Dropping the Butter Knives
A friend of mine used to work in the Saint Louis prison system as a mental health counselor. During one conversation, he told me that many of the white prisoners, to hear him put it, “glowed in the dark.†I didn’t think I heard him correctly, so I asked him exactly what he meant. I had images of day-glo white boys dancing in my head. As it turns out, Missouri is the methamphetamine capital of the Midwest, if not the country. Meth is cheap to produce — it’s the resulting product of a combination of regular household products — and it creates a high that, depending on how it is ingested, can last for 24 hours.
From what I’ve read the best way to describe meth is: Crack 2.0 — or crack on steroids. Imagine if your only contact with the rest of the world was television and Greyhound. One of the consequences of meth addiction is that fair skin becomes almost translucent, to the point that it appears almost to literally glow in the dark. My friend shared stories about entire rural towns of Missouri transformed damn near into ghost towns because everyone is wacked out on meth. In order to stem the tide of meth addicts and meth dealers, a number of draconian policies have been implemented. In rural chain stores, it is now illegal to purchase certain products in combination with one another (lye and engine starter fluid for example). And as my friend notes, the jails are filled with meth dealers who’ve addicted entire towns. When I heard the various speakers of the Democratic National Convention, this is what I thought about.
Substitute the words “crack†for “meth†and the narrative doesn’t change much. We focus on urban poverty for a number of legitimate reasons, but what we are ignoring is the fact that rural areas are being torn apart by the same forces that severely impacted places like Detroit and Saint Louis 20 years ago. Greyhound recently decided to radically reduce the number of rural places on their bus routes, as a cost cutting measure. Imagine if your only contact with the rest of the world was television and Greyhound and the only way you could get to the state college you were lucky enough to get some financial aid for was by Greyhound bus. Or if the only way you could get to your summer job was to go Greyhound. For the longest, people have treated places like North Saint Louis like separate (and unequal) nations.
For the longest time the Republican Party has been able to effectively divide two groups, the rural and urban poor, that have a lot in common by a combination of race-baiting, cultural conservatism, and knee-jerk patriotism. Think about Willie Horton and the 1988 Presidential Campaign. George Bush was actually behind in the polls to Michael Dukakis until Lee A*censored*er launched an ad that will go down in infamy. While representatives of various civil rights organizations (as well as Reverend Jesse Jackson) spoke out forcefully against the ad, Dukakis remained silent. By not countering with a trenchant critique of racism (A*censored*er later acknowledged that the ad was in fact racist, even though he and other GOP members denied the charge in 1988) the Democrats ceded valuable ground to the Republicans. Think about how a Constitutional Amendment against flag-burning was the pre-eminent issue in 1988, made far more important than the Iran-Contra scandal which revealed corruption and deceit in the highest levels of the White House. While perhaps it is not totally accurate to say that the Democratic Party laid down while the GOP used tactics to divide and obscure, it may not be far off the mark to say that the Democrats reclined. It is definitely not far off to say that the DNC was punk’d.
From what I heard last week, it seems that the Democratic Party is finally interested in getting up. They are finally interested in articulating a clear and distinct vision with some vigor, and some passion. They are finally interested in fighting for a set of issues that bring urban, suburban, and rural people together. They are finally interested in calling GOP baiting tactics for what they are. And they are tying the fight to a progressive vision of what America is supposed to be. Whether it was Reverend Sharpton (as an aside, I don’t like Sharpton’s politics much, but whoever made the decision to only give Sharpton six minutes of air time should be fired) quoting the late great (and Republican) Ray Charles, talking about the purple mountains that Charles could never see, or Obama talking about the myth of Blue and Red states, or Bill Clinton rattling off the names of various working class folks of various races who got the shaft as a result of the Bush tax cuts, it is hard for me to imagine that just four years ago the DNC actually had a game plan that relied on erasing differences between Gore and Bush.
The end effect of the Convention could very well be the beginning of a new alignment between the parents of meth-addicted prisoners, and the parents of low-level marijuana dealers serving 25 year sentences in order to fuel some upstate Republican’s desire to bring pork home to his constituents.
Now don’t get me wrong. The Democratic Party still has a lot of work to do. They are not quite willing to even say the words “urban agenda†for fear of being labeled “black lovers.†(I got a chance to hear former Senator Carol Mosely Braun speak in Saint Louis, and she indicated as much to me when I asked her about it.) And there is a distinct unwillingness to engage the elephant behind the door — the growing deficit caused by the Bush tax cut ain’t no joke. Finally it is not quite clear how much money they are going to spend on ensuring that black people turn out and that our votes are actually counted. Finally, a number of Americans (African Americans included) are uncomfortable with the idea of same sex marriage and the Democratic Party has dodged that issue. These non-stances, and more, are problematic and will continue to be problematic.
But I know this. Thinking about it in hip hop terms this is going to be an MC Battle that should give Hot 97’s Smackdown 2004 a run for its money. After years of being run by the Democratic Leadership Council’s “Republican-Lite†agenda, the Democrats have finally stopped bringing butter knives to the gunfight. And I’ll be damned if I’m not looking forward to the shootout at the OK Corral.
