Silence is complicity

I read Paul Theroux's Deep South recently. Theroux is known for his travel writing, most of which highlights trips in foreign lands. In Deep South Theroux decides to explore his own country, a part of the United States where he'd never really spent much time or knew much about other than through reading and listening to the news. Theroux is a Yankee to the bone --whenever he talks about home, he references his house on Cape Cod. In Deep South  he describes his wanderings around states like Mississippi and Alabama.

Unlike the typical travel book that narrates a person's mishaps and insights as they progress from Point A to Point Z, Deep South is circular. Theroux makes repeated trips to places like Brookdale, South Carolina, and Dumas, Arkansas. No surprise -- he finds appalling rural poverty, sees stuff that makes some of the Third World nations he's visited look good in comparison. He visits the same people multiple times so gets second, third, and fourth looks at communities that had this been a normal travel book he'd have passed through only one time.

One reason he finds the poverty, of course, is he's deliberately looking for it. He's taking back roads and stopping in the towns with multiple boarded up store fronts, dilapidated houses, and junked cars abandoned in people's yards. He's on the roads where the main roads used to go back in the days before the Interstate highway system and before state highway departments began routing major highways around towns instead of going right down Main Street (or its equivalent). He's stopping in the rural communities that were bustling when the typical family farm was a maybe 40 acres with a decent patch of cotton or sorghum or sugar cane and families had truck gardens and sold watermelons and peaches at roadside stands. Granted, a lot of those small farms in the deep South were occupied by sharecroppers or tenant farmers, but nonetheless you had a lot more individual farms in rural areas than exist today. More farms equals more people to shop at small local groceries, patronize the feed stores, and fill the churches. Then the farms became mechanized, more and more families pushed their kids to go north to Chicago or Detroit or west to California, the more successful small farmers expanded their holdings (farms went from 40 acres to 400 to 4000) and what was left?

The same thing you find in rural areas everywhere: ghost towns and the people who couldn't manage to make it out. When the number of farmers drops from hundreds to a handful, the local farmers' cooperative is going to see a pretty drastic drop in membership. You can see that same pattern in Kansas and the Dakotas and the upper Midwest. You see it here in the U.P.  Our county's population peaked in about 1940. It then dropped steadily for decades. It finally rebounded when the economy began improving about 20 years ago, and is now at an all-time high, but we've still got a bunch of ghost towns and boarded up buildings in the outlying communities, the backroads ones that used to be centered on farming and logging, like Pelkie and Covington.

Similarly there are dying small towns all over the country that had businesses that catered to travelers that wound up either shutting down or relocating when the highway by-pass went in. Brookdale and Orangeburg, South Carolina, aren't exactly unique in having moldering mom and pop motels that have either been shuttered for years or now muddle along after converting to low budget apartment complexes that do weekly rentals to people down on their luck and surviving on welfare vouchers. In fact, sometimes it doesn't even take a highway by-pass. All it takes is someone putting up a more modern motel, even something that's supposedly low budget and no frills like a Super 8 franchise, and suddenly the travelers are ignoring the older places that went up 20 or 30 years earlier.

So just what was Theroux's goal with this book? To find out for himself that parts of the Deep South are still stuck in the 19th century? To be able to put down on paper and somehow feel  morally superior that he heard white Southerners freely using the infamous N word? I don't know why he'd feel the need to go to Alabama for that -- I'm sure if he hung out in a diner on Cape Cod sooner or later he'd have heard the term bandied about by people who hadn't voted for Obama. Anyone who's ever made the mistake of reading the comments sections on the Internet knows Alabama and Mississippi don't exactly have a monopoly on racism and bigotry.

Maybe his goal was to do some Clinton bashing. He brings up the subject of the Clinton Foundation a number of times, usually with a fairly distinct slant. He visits a number of nonprofits that work on housing issues and anti-poverty programs and asks if they've gotten anything from the Clinton Foundation, usually followed by comments about how the Foundation is giving money to African countries so why won't it do anything in this country? To the credit of the people Theroux is trying to get a rise out of, they treat his questions as some sort of weird non sequitur and make it clear there's other stuff they'd rather talk about.

As an aside, I'll note that it appears Theroux has never bothered to actually look at the Clinton Foundation. If he'd taken the time to do some basic research (Google is your friend, Paul), he'd have learned that (a) the Clinton Foundation does have programs in the United States. It's supporting work in healthcare, education, and energy efficiency. In addition, he'd have known that the Foundation is a re-granting agency. That is, it doesn't administer programs directly. It gives money to other nonprofits, some of which do work themselves and some of which spread the funds out even more. It's analogous to the Kellogg Foundation or the Ford Foundation. (The museum I volunteer at has been given Kellogg Foundation money but it came through the Humanities Council of Michigan, not straight from Kellogg. Kellogg gave the Humanities Council a big pot of money that the Council then split into smaller pieces and awarded to small, local nonprofits.)

I have no clue why Theroux had a minor obsession with Clinton. He mentions William Jefferson Clinton a number of times and seems to think Bubba is somehow relevant at the time he's doing his road tripping in 2012, a dozen years after Clinton left office. I thought it was kind of weird that the name of Barack Obama didn't come up. If you're going to wander around the South chasing racism wouldn't the country's first black president be a tad more interesting to talk about than the good ol' boy who'd been gone for quite awhile?

I will give Theroux a few points for having the humility to describe an incident in which he's hoping to get a chance to speak directly with Congressman John Lewis at an event (Lewis was a speaker at a book festival). He gives his name to a person at the public library, and not only is he not recognized, his name is immediately mispronounced as "thorax." It's about there that he has a minor epiphany and realizes that (a) he's gotten old and (b) he looks like one of those disheveled geezers that amble around in public sounding confused and leaving people wondering if they're homeless.

So just what do the above paragraphs have to do with the title of this post? Not much, actually. However, on a number of occasions Theroux did talk with white Southerners. They're all old enough that they remember the 1950s, '60s, and '70s when the schools were desegregating. One fellow recalled an incident from his high school in the early 1970s. There was an assembly held in a gymnasium, a space where there weren't chairs, and students had to sit on the floor. A natural posture for 'anyone who's stuck sitting on a floor is to put your hands down and kind lean back using your arms to support you. The man remembered it was not long after the first black students were admitted to what had been an all-white high school. He said that there were a group of black students sitting on the floor like that, using their hands to make sitting on the floor more comfortable, and every single white student who walked past them stepped on the black hands. The black kids suffered in silence; the white kids pretended nothing was happening. The old white  guy said he felt real bad about it. Sure he did. He felt so bad about it he said nothing at the time and no doubt stepped on a few hands himself. Peer pressure makes a marvelous excuse after the fact.

Theroux mentioned a number of similar incidents that 30 or 40 years later that white people were still feeling guilty about -- and well they should. One can't help but wonder if some of the tensions over civil rights would have eased sooner if a few more people had spoken up instead of worrying about what the neighbors would say or how their friends might mock them. You know, when you hear people say they would have spoken up but they thought they were the only ones who felt that way what they're actually articulating is the perfect reason for speaking up about anything that bothers you. If you never say anything, you'll never know if anyone else agrees with you. It is possible to point out that something is wrong or misinformed without being overly confrontational about it. Silence equals complicity. Doing nothing is a political act.

And even if when you do speak up the result is a supposed friend becomes angry or you end up being socially shunned, so what? What have you lost? The companionship of someone you've just realized is a sadistic asshat or an unabashed bigot? Taking the moral high ground can be uncomfortable at the time, but at least you won't find yourself confessing to an author 30 or 40 years later that "I should have said something."