Thank You Dr. Feelgood

[Editor’s note: This is the last of this week’s series of responses to the U.S. presidential election.]

Flying home on the airplane Sunday I could actually bring myself to read election analysis in the New York Times.  All week I had avoided turning on the TV, except for football games, lest I encounter the smirking faces of the triumphant President and his merry band.

Last Tuesday evening, we had gone from election coverage to an old movie around 9:30, when it seemed clear Ohio was lost.  (Was Ohio stolen in fact?  We shall never know.)  But enough was enough, and I had an early morning flight to catch to Memphis, Tennessee and a convention with fellow historians.

On the plane I read the record of an 1875 Senate hearing that had investigated the violent overthrow of the last Reconstruction government, in Mississippi, in 1875.  After the Civil War, backed up by federal military force, the Republican Party had attempted to construct bi-racial democracy in the South.  With Union troops withdrawn, white Democrats had regrouped, using paramilitary means to seize power for white supremacy. The motto of the self-styled “White Liners” of Mississippi in 1875 was “peacefully if possible, violently if necessary.”  I had no idea that intimidation could take so many forms, including shooting Republican leaders, white and black, and policing the polling places with heavily armed goon squads. Gruesome and riveting, the stories in those hearings will be central to my new book on terrorism and American state formation.

‘The Solid South’

Back then the Solid South (Solid meaning containing all whites and excluding all blacks) was Democratic.  Over the past forty years, as the Democrats sponsored civil rights for black people and other aspects of modernizing reform, Republicans have replaced the Democrats in the South, but the white solidarity remains the same, although violence is now unusual (as opposed to other forms of intimidation at the polls, still a constant in many places). Democrats in the South are a dying breed, and the Republican base has become extremely solid there, as it is among conservative Christians in the rest of the nation—not just Evangelicals, but Catholics, Lutherans and other traditionalists.

Opposition to gay marriage — a completely phony issue—activated this very broad base — including considerable numbers of impoverished Hispanics -- just as Karl Rove believed it would.  Lots of poor people with traditional fears (AKA traditional values), voted against their class interests in large enough numbers to offset an impressive Democratic mobilization of their urban voters.  The Democrats’ only silver lining is that younger voters went for them—which gives some hope for the future, despite their loses in the ever-growing moralistic judgementalist camp.

But I cannot really get myself into an analytic mode yet.  What will the Democrats need to do next?  Maybe I can write about that later. Much later.

Anyway, on the plane, I felt pretty good, working on my next book.  After all, I know that I lack political power and access to it, and beyond teaching my terrific students and my hobby of sometimes inaccurate punditry, what I actually do is to write iconoclastic books about the American past, seeking to understand the violent underpinnings of the Republic of Low Taxes and Worse Services.  I have a vocation as a kind of social critic, and I do believe that the world will survive four more years of this administration.  After all we have survived Genghis Khan, Celine Dion and the Black Death.

On Beale Street

Still, I could not say my mood was ebullient after my plane touched down, and then I rode into town in a taxi driven by a Somali immigrant who told me that he voted for Bush because it was not natural for a man to marry a man.  I asked how Bush aided him economically.  He said he was poor now but that he would one day own his own cab and that Bush would be good for his aspirations.

Later that evening, after dinner at the Rendezvous, a huge and famous ribs place in Memphis (almost as good as the Memphis barbecue you can get in Vancouver), my old pal, Dan, and I went along to Beale Street.  We walked into a joint where a black man in his sixties—“Dr. Feelgood”—was playing harp and singing the Delta Blues, modern electronic version.  His two sisters were in the house, down from Chicago with their husbands to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of one of the couples.  And his wife and favorite uncle were in the house.  Dr. Feelgood sang a huge and rambunctious set, backed by a really tight and driving band.  He was full of soul, singing to his family and to all of us about the pleasures of not just surviving but finding joy in the ordinary things of life, even if one lived on the bottom, kept there by The Man.

Afterwards I went over to the good Doctor and his sister who was celebrating her anniversary: “I have been in the dumps all day because of that terrible election.  But I want to tell you that listening to you sing, and seeing your pleasure in your family and in life, I realized that you have been bringing it long before anybody heard of George W. Bush, and you will be bringing it long after he is just a bad memory.” 

He gave me a great big smile and a great big hug. I went out into the night feeling the release transcendent art brings, ready to get back at it.

Historian Michael Fellman, author of several books on the Civil War including The Making of Robert E. Lee, is Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University. He contributed occasional columns on the U.S. presidential election for The Tyee.