Now suppose you were a little boy or girl and lived in one of the plantation homes many years ago. You wake up early in the morning, bathe, dress and run down the long stairs to have breakfast with your family. The Negro cook whom you call “Mammy” comes in bringing a great tray of food…. “Good morning, Miss Mary; good morning, Mr. John,” she says….

After breakfast, you go out into the back yard with your father…. “You want to ride the fields with me today?” your father asks…. [You] ride off toward the flat acres of cotton and corn fields. You can see the Negroes working in the white cotton…[moving] slowly down the long rows, picking cotton from every stalk. There are men and women, young and old, who work in the fields for your father.

[P]lantation owners had many slaves. Most of them were treated kindly. There were a few masters who did not treat their slaves kindly. The first thing any good master thought about was the care of his slaves….

As you ride up beside the Negroes in the field they stop working long enough to look up, tip their hats and say, “Good morning, Master John.” You like the friendly way they speak and smile; they show bright rows of white teeth.

“How’s it coming, Sam?” your father asks one of the old Negroes.

“Fine, Marse Tom, jes’ fine. We got ‘most more cotton than we can pick.” Then Sam chuckles to himself and goes back to picking as fast as he can.

Offended yet? Wondering what awful white supremacist tract or ill-conceived novelization yielded such a wistful paean for the carefree days of slavery? Would you be surprised if I told you that it came from neither of those sources, but rather from the 1957 edition of Know Alabama, the fourth-grade history text that was used in our state’s public schools?

Well, it did. I came across this little gem a while back, nosing through the stacks in Jim Reed’s fine bookshop over on 3^rd Avenue North. I thumbed through a few pages and bought it on a whim, intending less to read it than to have a nice keepsake of a simpler time and place. When I finally sat down with it in an idle moment not long ago, and read the story of young Master John — and Mammy and Sam and the “little Negro boy” who “is called ‘Jig’…because he dances so well when the Negroes play their banjos” — I came to a richer understanding of Alabama.

More specifically, I was struck by the thought of how many of Alabama’s white children of that era had their minds warped by a system that was supposed to be fulfilling the higher mission of education — that is, inculcating a notion of the broadness and fullness of the world and providing students with the intellectual grounding to function as productive members of the human enterprise. Instead, we got a generation of white kids who were urged to think about how neat it would have been to grow up the scion of a slave owner.

Many, of course, overcame that disadvantage. Others did not. Either way, I find myself reflecting anew on the many ways in which our people have been betrayed by their leaders, how our history has been perverted and our potential diverted, all at the expense of the many and for the benefit of the few.

It goes back far beyond 1957, of course. It goes back to the Alabama Constitution of 1901, the world’s longest governing document — it has been amended more than 850 times — and the archaic repository of racist language that, because it remains the law of our state, is more shameful than anything to be found in a Jim Crow textbook.

Take the constitution’s requirement for racially segregated education. This provision has not been enforced since the 1960s, but its lingering presence on the books is used against Alabama periodically in the fierce competition with other states to attract new business and industry. An amendment that would have removed this language was put before voters in 2004, but was defeated.

That opportunity is before us again when we go to the polls next Tuesday. Only this time, in true Alabama fashion, it’s more complicated — to the point that black legislators and the Alabama Education Association (in other words, the power structure of the Alabama Democratic Party) are urging us to vote against it. They contend that, as written, the amendment to remove racist language would also remove the obligation of state government to provide free public education.

This assertion is disputed by some notable legal scholars, including those working with the nonprofit Alabama Citizens for Constitution Reform on an article-by-article revision of the entire antiquated document. Whether the Democratic opposition is based on real concern or the simple fact that the measure was advanced by a Republican legislator is impossible to say, given the abominable track record of both parties in doing things that positively impact the lives of Alabamians.

So what to do on Tuesday? I won’t presume to tell you what to do, but I’m voting “Yes” on Amendment 4. Like the vote earlier this year to allow the governor and legislature to tap the Alabama Trust Fund to balance the state budget, this proposal presents Alabama voters with a no-win choice. And, as in that situation, my decision puts me at odds with a lot of people I respect and admire. But we need a constitution that moves Alabama out of the 19^th century and in the direction of the 21^st — we sort of missed the 20^th altogether — and this is a good place to start.

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com.

It bears remembering that the Senate at the time still had some hold on its self-proclaimed status as the greatest deliberative body in the world. Both major parties had room for conservative and liberal wings, and each of those terms actually carried intellectual weight. Certainly the bar of service was considerably higher then than now — for decency, for competence, for the willingness to leave party affiliation and ideological baggage at the door when it came to doing what was best for the country.

Want an example? Consider the Food Stamp Reform Act of 1977, which was shepherded into law by co-sponsors McGovern — a liberal Democrat from South Dakota — and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican and rock-ribbed conservative. The legislation accomplished the dual feat of tightening eligibility requirements for food stamps and making them available to more people. (For those who are reading this and grumbling about the fact that, once upon a time, Democrats and Republicans came together and decided it might be good for the government of the richest nation on earth to help alleviate hunger among its citizenry — well, I’d tell you to go to hell, but I’m guessing you’re probably doing a pretty good job of punching your own ticket.)

McGovern’s political career began in 1956, with his election to the first of two terms in the House of Representatives. The Republican incumbent he defeated tried to paint him as a Communist sympathizer. McGovern’s response exemplified the quiet moral authority that formed the core of his persona as well as his political philosophy. “I have always despised communism and every other ruthless tyranny over the mind and spirit of man,” he said.

A bid for the U.S. Senate in 1960 came up short, but McGovern ran for South Dakota’s other seat two years later and won. In the interim, President John F. Kennedy appointed him to head the new administration’s Food for Peace program — which had been created as the result of an initiative championed by McGovern while he was in Congress, calling for America to use its food surplus both to combat hunger at home and as a foreign policy tool. In a little over a year under his leadership, Food for Peace established its presence in a dozen countries, increased the number of Americans receiving surplus food by more than 10 million and provided an economic boost to the nation’s family-owned farms.

In the Senate, McGovern strongly supported the Kennedy Administration’s domestic goals, but became a vocal critic of its foreign policy — most especially the expanding American commitment to the war in Vietnam. In 1963, McGovern became the first Senator to publicly oppose the war, warning that the nation was heading down a path of “moral debacle and political defeat.” In the years that followed, he became one of the leading voices calling for an end to what he termed, in an emotional 1970 speech on the Senate floor, “this damnable war.”

“This chamber reeks of blood,” McGovern told his colleagues. “It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.”

His anti-war stance was the basis of McGovern’s run for President in 1972, when the journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote that he was “the only candidate in either party worth voting for.” Once he won the Democratic nomination, McGovern’s “dove” status was used by President Richard Nixon’s campaign as a bludgeon. The Nixon team called him a coward — a scurrilous charge against a man who had volunteered for duty in World War II and become a highly decorated fighter pilot — and slurred his liberal record, saying his platform was Amnesty (for draft dodgers), Acid and Abortion.

It worked, of course, aided by numerous missteps in McGovern’s own campaign. He lost by what then was the second-largest landslide in American history. Two years later, he was re-elected to the Senate, where he resumed his activism against hunger and for better nutrition. As part of his drive to pass the Food Stamp Reform Act, he authored a document that came to be known as The McGovern Report. The report proved prophetic in its identification of issues that beset America today, noting the direct link between changes in the nation’s intake of sugar, salt and fatty foods and the growing incidence of heart disease, cancer, obesity and stroke.

McGovern lost his Senate seat in the “Reagan Revolution” of 1980, but continued until the end of his life to work for the issues that were the basis of his liberalism. In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed him as ambassador to the United Nations agencies involved in food and agriculture. He enlisted his old ally Bob Dole in the effort that in 2000 resulted in the creation by Congress of a global food and nutrition program that bears both of their names and has fed tens of millions of children in more than 40 countries.

When I heard of McGovern’s death on Sunday, at age 90, I thought back to that 1972 Presidential campaign. I was in the fourth grade, and on Election Day that November, our classroom took a vote of its own. It was 27-1 for Nixon. Guess who cast the lone McGovern vote?

Now, I can’t claim any preternatural political leanings. I hadn’t followed the campaign that closely, and wouldn’t become actively interested in the political process for a few more years. My parents were reliable Democrats, but they didn’t discuss their views around the house. Frankly, I’m not even sure how they voted that year.

So why did I “vote” for McGovern? Looking back, and taking this opportunity to reflect on his life and legacy, I’m thinking it’s because I’ve always known a decent man when I see one.

Mark Kelly is the publisher of  Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com

Are you never going to give any of these considerations any thought and never going to apply any healing treatment to your wounds, instead of sowing the seeds of worry for yourself by hoping for this or that, or despairing of obtaining this or that other thing? If you’re sensible you’ll run the two together, and never hope without an element of despair, never despair without an element of hope.

                                                                        — Seneca

“Are you optimistic about the future?”

The question came from a buddy of mine who’s a good many years younger than I. The latter fact, plus that the query came over a beer at one of our fine local breweries, seemed to demand a reflective answer. And the fact that I’m still thinking about it after a good night’s sleep suggests that my response was both an honest, heartfelt summation of my thoughts and yet somehow incomplete.

Essentially, what I said to my friend was that I don’t think too much about the future because that keeps me from living in the present. None of us is guaranteed anything more than the moment we’re in, and we owe it to ourselves and those who love and rely upon us — and upon whom we love and rely in return — to be fully aware and accordingly engaged at all times. Joy and sorrow, work and play, movement and repose, excitement and drudgery, failure and success — every opposite is one, like the two ends of a string or the faces of a coin. All is life, and life does nothing but pass if you don’t embrace every bittersweet second of it.

Of course, this is much easier said than done. We live in shallow times, in which quantity is increasingly valued over quality and substance takes a back seat to appearance and effluvia. A million vested interests compete for our attention, each straining to outdo the others in volume and garishness and few if any of them with our individual or collective best interests in mind. Trying to separate that which is useful from that which seeks only to use us is akin to panning for gold. If you doubt this, just switch on your television during the hours cynically known as “prime time.” Or visit al.com.

The other thing I said in response to my friend was a paraphrase of a bit of philosophy from Walker Percy. As keen an observer and explainer of the human condition as ever set pen to paper, Percy had an essentially dark view of the world and the direction in which it seemed, during his life (he died in 1989) and even more so now, to be headed. Two things counterbalanced his pessimism, however, one temporal and one eternal.

The latter was his deep religious faith, the belief in individual redemption and the promise of a higher plane of existence. The former was a native Stoicism that was rooted in both the Southern culture and traditions in which Percy was raised and his own experience of the world, which included among other formative influences the suicide of his father when the future author was barely a teenager and the death two years later of his mother in a one-car accident that, Percy himself at least suspected, might also have been intentional. These two elements came together in an approach to life that I sum up with the somewhat inelegant formulation that the world may be going to hell in a handcart, but there’s no reason to let that ruin an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

In other words, the basis of one’s — or, in this case, my — relative optimism or pessimism is ultimately illusory. So where does that leave me, having spun this tenuous web from a seemingly simple question lobbed over a friendly libation? Well, among other places, it leaves me with this thought: What matters for me, the thing that truly determines the quality of my life and the ultimate worth of my time — as father, son, brother, friend, writer, thinker, citizen — is the effort I put forth.

I want to make the world — or, realistically speaking, my little corner of it — a better place, but I accept that everything I attempt may well come to naught, that the only lasting evidence of my existence may be the marker on my grave. At the same time, I believe firmly that the only unacceptable thing is the failure to try — to take the world as it comes, to strive to be fully engaged in every aspect of my existence, and to appreciate the grand opportunity that is life.

That’s all I can do. That’s all any of us can do.

I had barely set foot on the field during the first several games. There were three upperclassmen, as well as my friend and classmate Bob Mills, ahead of me in the receiving corps. But I had sure hands and a little speed, and so it was that as we took the field for practice on the Monday after a blowout loss in which three fumbles had been lost on punt returns, Coach Jimmy Mayfield informed me that I was the new punt returner. He gave me a single directive, Zen-like in its simplicity.

“Hang on to the damn ball,” he said.

Which I did. I didn’t exactly dazzle anybody with highlight reel runbacks. But I also did not fumble, and thus was firmly ensconced in my position when we made our trip to Sheffield to wrap up the season.

That night, I broke a long return for the first time. It was 35 years ago next month, but even now I can hear the roar that rose from the stands as I darted into the open and smell the damp grass onto which I finally was tackled 45 yards downfield. It set up our only touchdown of the night. I also wound up catching two or three passes when Coach got mad at one of the starters for some reason and, presumably as a reward for hanging onto the damn ball, played me on offense for the entire second half.

I tell you all of this so that you might understand just how utterly full of myself I was when I got onto that bus for the 20-mile ride home. I was running my mouth from the moment I sat down, and it took all of about five minutes for me to run it right into a disagreement with the teammate sitting behind me, a fellow named Mike Franks. I don’t remember what it was about, but at some point in the back-and-forth, I told Mike that when we got home to Russellville, I intended to kick his butt. He indicated that he’d be happy to give me that opportunity — which should have been all the warning I needed.

I’ll hasten to tell you here that while I’ve never lacked for physical courage when a situation demands it, I was never much for trying to prove anything through physical violence — and that my decision to abandon that philosophy on that particular evening was ill-advised. For one thing, I weighed maybe 140 pounds at the time. Mike Franks was a year older and had probably 30 pounds on me. He was one of those unprepossessingly rock-solid country boys whose solidity you don’t appreciate fully until he’s put you in a headlock and hit you in the face several times.

Which is what happened that night. We changed out of our uniforms at the field house, and then the entire football team gathered in the parking lot in front of the school auditorium and watched Mike Franks clean my clock.

Even then, I figured I’d pretty much got what was coming to me for behaving like a grade-A jackass. This point was driven home to me the following Monday, when I walked into the biology class taught by one of our assistant coaches, Dwight Lawler. Coach Lawler, of course, knew all about the fight, and as we filed into class, he motioned me over to his desk and cheerfully offered up some folk wisdom.

“Kelly,” he said. “Never let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.”

Something else happened that Monday as well. At some point during the day, I stopped for a drink at a hallway water fountain, then turned to find myself face-to-face with Mike Franks.

“Hey, man,” I said after a moment’s pause.

“Hey,” Mike replied, clapping me on the shoulder as we passed. And that was that. Not that we became great pals, but the fight was already in the past. Indeed, I suspect that if I ran into Mike Franks at my favorite watering hole this afternoon, he’d let me buy him a beer and thank him for teaching me a lesson that has stayed with me unto this very same day.

Which brings me to the point of this rather embarrassing story: Somehow, we have forgotten how to disagree. We have become overly sensitive, too quick to take umbrage at the slightest offense and too willing to escalate past the point of no return whenever our too-fragile egos are threatened.

It happens in friendships, partnerships and marriages, when people lose sight of the things that brought them together in the first place. It happens in politics, when the desire to win an office or prevail on an issue overwhelms principle and makes the personal destruction of an opponent seem permissible. It happens every time some kid loses a fistfight and decides that the only proper response is to return with a gun and take the life of the person who bested him. It happens because we are too full of ourselves, and too devoid of concern for others.

It happens. But it shouldn’t. We’re getting our collective clock cleaned every day, societally speaking, and we need to take a lesson from it before we slide irrevocably into the sad purgatory reserved for the terminally self-absorbed.

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com.

—   Lewis Mumford

Way back in the dawn of time (1997, it was), when I was working for Black & White, I penned a column bemoaning the dead zone that was downtown Birmingham on weekends. On any given Saturday afternoon, I wrote, you could fire a cannon the length of 2^nd Avenue North and not be in danger of hitting anything other than Gus Koutroulakis’s yellow Mercury station wagon parked in front of his place of business, Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs.

I got to thinking about that column Saturday evening, as I drove home through downtown with my children. Along with 60 or so other folks, we had spent the couple of hours just after sunset in Oak Hill Cemetery, watching the harvest moon rise over Birmingham. Early cloud cover made the lunar show less than spectacular, though my kids and the new friends they found at Oak Hill made an adventure of that as they hopped among the headstones, one or another of them yelling out every time the moon shone through the gauzy billows that ringed the skyline.

For those who don’t know, Oak Hill is an underappreciated local treasure. It’s the oldest burial ground in the city proper, predating the founding of Birmingham by a couple of years. Situated just northwest of the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex, it is the final resting place of many of Birmingham’s most distinguished early citizens. The two men who can be said to be most responsible for the fact that Birmingham is here at all — John T. Milner and James Withers Sloss — are buried there, along with a couple of Alabama governors, a like number of mayors — including our first, Robert Henley — and a slew of others whose names — Caldwell, DeBardeleben, Jordan — still adorn streets, buildings and institutions around the city and county.

My single favorite thing at Oak Hill is the modest brownstone mausoleum that houses the remains of Charles Linn. Founder of one of the city’s first ironworks as well as its first bank — the First National Bank of Birmingham, forerunner of AmSouth, which merged with Regions in 2006 — he’s also the namesake of Linn Park, which was the city’s first official public green space, dedicated in 1883 as Central Park (it also was known as Capitol Park, then Woodrow Wilson Park before being named for Linn in 1988).

On one side of Linn’s mausoleum is a plaque that includes something he said when fewer than 4,000 souls called Birmingham home and its very survival was open to question. I’ve visited this spot, the door of which looks directly upon downtown, and read this plaque probably no fewer than 40 times. Every time — including when I read it aloud to my kids Saturday night — I get a lump in my throat.

Bury me on the high promontory overlooking the city of Birmingham, in which you men profess to have little faith, so that I may walk out on Judgment Day and view the greatest industrial city in the entire South.

Maybe it’s because my children were with me, but the lump pretty much stayed there for the rest of the evening — sitting back in my camp chair as they scampered around with the other kids; thinking about my good fortune when they came to sit — my daughter in my lap, my son on the ground next to us — to talk and gaze skyward with me for awhile; feeling the hint of fall in the night air as we gathered our things and made our way back to the car. If there was a better way that I might have spent a Saturday night, I can’t say what it was.

And it only got better on the short drive home, through the streetscape that brought to mind those words I wrote 15 years ago. Fifteen years is an eternity in some ways and the blink of an eye in others, but I found myself feeling the same sort of wonder and gratitude I’d felt up at Oak Hill. Wonder that the downtown that 15 years ago seemed as dead as the surface of the moon we’d just been watching has been, if not yet completely transformed, then at least given a new heart, a new sense of vitality and possibility. And gratitude that not only have I been here in Birmingham to see and mark it, but that I have children to share it with and, hopefully, to whom I can pass on my love for it.

There are two kinds of change in the world — revolutionary and evolutionary. The former is relatively rare. The latter takes place every day, before our eyes and yet, too often, unnoted and unappreciated, like the growth of a tree or the maturation of a child or the passage of our own brief time upon the earth. Or, as it occurred to me Saturday night, driving through the streets of Birmingham with the windows down to take the cooling air — streets alive with activity that only a few short years ago seemed improbable at best — like the visible transformation of a city.

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com

— Thomas Merton

There is a photograph that I love, a picture of four men posed together outside what appears to be the back of a large auditorium. One of the men is dressed as Abraham Lincoln, complete with stovepipe hat. Another is dressed in the vestments of a Pope (he bears just enough resemblance to both John Paul II and Benedict that it’s hard to say whether he’s supposed to be one of those two or just a generic Pontiff). A third is dressed as an old-time minstrel, a white man in blackface, wearing a tuxedo suit with a floppy bowtie, sporting a boutonniere and strumming a banjo strapped over his shoulder.

The fourth man is Bob Dylan — not a man dressed as Bob Dylan, but Dylan himself, standing stoically between the ersatz Bishop of Rome and the facsimile of the Great Emancipator. He is turned out in the manner in which he generally has appeared onstage for the past decade or so. Which is to say that he looks as far from the 21^st century as Tupelo is from Timbuktu, in a baby blue Western suit with fancy black piping and details, white eighth notes sewn onto the jacket cuffs, lapels adorned with treble clefs amid a garland pattern, all topped off by a neatly blocked cowboy hat with the brim turned up sharply on the sides.

This picture appears on the back cover of Bob Dylan in America, the historian Sean Wilentz’s appealingly idiosyncratic assessment of Dylan’s unique and enduring place in our nation’s music, culture and history. The photo speaks volumes to me as both a Dylan fan and an American, encapsulating as it does his bedrock connection to and methodical transcendence of the both the actualities of our nationhood and the myths and legends that once defined and unified and sustained us but now are fading away.

The presence of the blackface minstrel might be objectionable to some, certainly to those who are unaware of the status of minstrelsy as the first genuinely American theatrical form, practiced by both white and black performers. Musically and philosophically, Dylan is tapped into these roots. Indeed, he has long viewed himself much less as an artist than as a troubadour in the minstrel tradition, plying the wares of his trade. As Wilentz puts it, Dylan has an uncanny ability, as songwriter and performer, to “reinhabit worlds that had completely disappeared…reclaim[ing] the present by reclaiming the past.”

Throughout his career, and particularly during the current run of his recorded work that dates back to 2001’s Love and Theft, Dylan has spun gold from the threads of American history and culture — employing song forms from the rock era all the way back to centuries-old Scots-Irish ballads — and his personal memories, perceptions and vision. The resulting music seems intimately familiar and, at the same time, new and utterly different than anything else ever heard.

This certainly goes for Tempest, Dylan’s latest, released a couple of weeks ago. Rocking, grooving, swinging, crooning — backed by his touring band, plus David Hidalgo of Los Lobos — he works his way through 10 songs that evoke artists from Louis Armstrong to Lightnin’ Hopkins to John Lennon — the last of whom is the subject of “Roll On John,” the impressionistic tribute that closes the album. Swirling guitars and a brooding bass mix and alternate with fiddle, banjo, accordion and pedal steel in works that, whether the arrangement is dense, spare or in between, sound like America.

Lyrically, you’d be hard pressed to find a darker Dylan record. The album is populated by graves and corpses, blood and doom, death and dying and disaster. It’s as if he’s taking the measure of all of the faults and shortcomings and missteps that brought us to the fractious times in which we live. Delivering the words in that gloriously ravaged voice, he could be an Old Testament prophet singing his tidings of demise.

Nowhere are his powers on greater display than the 14-minute title track. Ostensibly a retelling of the sinking of the Titanic, it plays more like a history of America set to music that is simultaneously a sea chantey, a vaudeville ballad and a funereal hymn. In it, Dylan does what he’s always done, weaving a tapestry of fact, myth, speculation and free association — there’s even an oblique shout-out to Leonardo DiCaprio — of words and images freighted with meanings both literal and symbolic. It’s an amazing song.

Now 71, Dylan shows little interest in slowing down. He continues to tour the world relentlessly, averaging well over 100 dates per year for roughly the past quarter-century. Between this and the quality of his recordings, he seems to have achieved something like a state of grace, reconciled at last to his status as a musical and cultural icon and an historic figure.

Which brings us back to that photograph. Standing there with the other icons, looking squarely at the camera, there is something in Dylan’s face that illuminates his self-awareness.

“Look while you can,” his expression seems to say. “When I’m gone, you’ll never see the likes of me again. When I’m gone, America is going to miss me.”

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com

                                                            —Sam Rayburn

I will begin by stipulating that Birmingham is a hard town. It is fractured and fractious. It is conservative by nature and insular by disposition, enamored of the status quo and religiously averse to innovation and risk. It is segregated spiritually, in ways that have both everything and nothing at all to do with race relations. It is a riddle for which a satisfactory answer has yet to be found.

I will stipulate these things — but in fairness, I will ask you to stipulate the following: Birmingham is a damn fine place to live, work and play. Rich in history, with a landscape that is lovely to the eye and a populace that is almost uniformly cordial to strangers (it’s just ourselves we can’t seem to stand, more about which in a moment), our city is an intriguing work in progress, negotiating the open territory between becoming and being. It is a place that, each and every day, offers those who are attuned to its rhythms with living, breathing proof that the journey is more important — and probably more interesting — than the destination.

Now that we have established our terms, here’s the real point about Birmingham: We are better than we think we are. Indeed, among the fair share of faults we exhibit, the most overlooked and perhaps the most damaging as well, is our lack of aptitude for celebrating ourselves and our civic accomplishments. I wonder if there is another city on earth that holds itself in such low regard. Is there another community like Birmingham, where there is such reticence toward the idea that, not only can growth and progress take place, but that it is taking place?

Did I say “reticence”? In some cases, it’s outright hostility toward civic aspiration, a premature disappointment in every effort that holds promise and knee-jerk disparagement of every substantive sign of progress. In this view, Birmingham is bad — always has been, always will be. According to this lazy, fearful, self-loathing line of thought, the sins of the fathers are the sins of the sons. We get what we deserve, though why we deserve it depends upon whom you listen to — it’s the fault of the whites, the blacks, the elite, the labor unions, the self-interested speculators, the absentee owners of our major industries. Plenty of blame to go around; lots of fire, but no light.

This is not a new phenomenon. Back in February of 1961, Sidney Smyer — the president of Birmingham Realty Company and the most influential local businessman of a couple of generations — made a speech to a joint meeting of the downtown Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. This was just about the time that Smyer privately approached the Birmingham Bar Association to request that it undertake a study of the structure and operations of city government, including recommendations for changes to be approved by voters — the beginning of the process by which Birmingham rid itself of Bull Connor (hey, there’s an accomplishment to be proud of; if we can get rid of Bull, what else might we be able to do for ourselves?).

But that was still in the future when Smyer stood up and gave the assembled business leadership of Birmingham what for, as the old folks used to say. He demanded decisive action, and put forward a plan for moving Birmingham toward “a new and shining destiny.” He fired a warning shot across the bow of any who would stand in the way of progress or talk down Birmingham’s chances for improving itself.

“We must stop sitting on our hands, or else wringing them in self-pity,” Smyer declared. “I am sick and tired of the po’ mouth talk I hear everywhere I go.”

I thought of that a week or so ago, when I met a young woman who was in Birmingham to interview for a job. Born in Mobile, she has spent much of her life in Louisiana, earning a degree from LSU and then taking her first job in New Orleans. Eager to be on her own and get her adult life and career established in earnest, she began looking for a city to move to. After several visits with friends from Mobile who now live here, she settled on Birmingham.

“I think it’s a very cool place,” she replied when asked what made Birmingham attractive. “There’s so much going on. You have all of these parks and trails, people living downtown, what seems to be a good music scene. Whenever I tell people in New Orleans that I’m moving to Birmingham, I hear the same thing: ‘It’s a really nice city. You’re going to love living there.’”

And so, this young woman starts work at Weld the first week of October. Another recruit in the growing army of people who love this city and are willing to put their shoulder to the wheel of progress. And a new perspective on the kind of place we already are, and on the many things we have to celebrate and build upon.

Actually, isn’t that what we’ve been doing all along, and especially for the last breathless half-century? Building? And 51 years after Sidney Smyer’s call to action, if you don’t believe that Birmingham is a better place, you are denigrating a lot of people who put a lot of time into bringing us to this enviable point on our journey. Maybe you should stop kicking and pick up a hammer. We’ve got ourselves a barn to finish, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com

Listen closely, for it is one that is all too familiar if you’ve lived for long in our fair state. It is one that emanates from the Alabama State Capitol and the Office of the Governor, resounding across hill and hollow, from Alabama’s northern vales to its southern shores. It is the same sound we hear every time our state government faces a fiscal crisis or stands at a moral crossroads.

It is the unmistakable sound of a can being kicked down a road.

The road in this case is the metaphorical one that runs in front of our collective house, this beautiful and bedeviling State in which we reside. And the can? The can is us, the people of Alabama — us and the problems that, in a righteous world, we would look to state government to solve or, at the very least, not make worse.

But righteous the world is not, a piece of information that should not qualify as breaking news to anyone who didn’t fall off a turnip truck coming through the big city within the past 24 hours. The environment in which our state government functions is a foul and swampy miasma of petty corruption and institutionalized misfeasance, made fouler and swampier in recent years by the complete devolution of our political process into a trench war of partisan interests that have no inclination to facilitate government of, by and for the people.

One outgrowth of this squalid ground is the special election the State of Alabama has scheduled for next Tuesday, September 18. I’m going to be accused of partisanship myself here, but let’s just call this one for what it is: An assault on the public treasury; a dastardly and cowardly act by a state government — the executive, legislative and judicial branches, a balance of power without wisdom — conjoined in a conspiracy of inadequacy. When even doing nothing at all would be a better option, they insist upon doing something bad. When faced with hard choices, they defer — past the next election, into the next generation, unto Kingdom Come.

In other words, they kick the can down the road. And here they come again.

What we are being asked…no, that’s too active a word, asked. What is being made available to the voters of Alabama — but only to certain voters, and very quietly, like inside information on a stock that’s about to take off — is an amendment to the Constitution of 1901. The official ballot language tells us that the amendment is intended “to provide adequate funding for the State General Fund budget, to prevent the mass release of prisoners from Alabama prisons, and to protect critical health services to Alabama children, elderly, and mothers by transferring funds from the Alabama Trust Fund to the State General Fund.”

Holy Lord, that’s frightening stuff. Throw some frogs and locusts and boils and fire into the mix with all of those mass-released convicts and endangered children, elderly and mothers, and this little special election that nobody knows about begins to take on Biblical proportions. Can Alabama be saved?

Unfortunately, the outcome of the September 18 referendum will not answer that question, because this election is not about saving the future of Alabama. It is about covering the asses of our state’s political “leadership” by allowing them to continue the grand tradition of kicking the can down the road.

What the amendment actually amounts to is this: The people of Alabama are being asked to loan Governor Bentley — and, perhaps, his successor — and the Alabama Legislature roughly $150 million per year for at least the next three years. They promise to pay it back — at a point in the future that they don’t wish to specify at this time.

This money will come from the Alabama Trust Fund — the people’s savings account, if you want to look at it that way, or our investment portfolio, if you want to look at it otherwise. Either way, it’s our money, created and perpetuated by funds generated from leasing of the rights to drill and develop natural gas reserves in the waters off the Alabama coast.

And now, because they have failed in their mutual responsibility of dealing with the problems that plague our state — prisons overcrowded by bad laws and bad courts; children, elderly and mothers wracked into poverty by inadequate education, health care and nutrition — the governor and the legislature want to raid the people’s savings account of nearly a half-a-billion dollars to cover the depth and gravity of their sins. And so they use scare tactics, flaunting their lack of regard for our intelligence and attention span in the very language of the ballot.

It’s probably going to work, by the way, and shame on us. On the other hand, let’s give them credit for doing a fine job of keeping this election — and its cost to Alabama taxpayers — a secret. They want and need a low turnout, and so rather than hold this election in conjunction with the one scheduled just seven weeks later, they spend $3 million more of our money to stage a facsimile of democracy on a quiet Tuesday in the waning days of summer.

The official reason for this is that the state’s fiscal year starts October 1, and the funds need to be in place by that time to, among other things, avoid disruption of Medicaid-funded services. Alright then. But doesn’t that beg the question of why we’re settling this with less than two weeks to spare? Did it have to come to this point?

Unfortunately, it did, because all our “leaders” do in Alabama is kick the can down the road. But now that it is at that point, let’s make them do their jobs. Let’s get out and vote “No.”

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write him at mark@weldbham.com.

My own feelings about the former Alabama Governor — who goes to jail on September 11, six years after his conviction on charges of bribery along with Richard Scrushy, the founder and former CEO of HealthSouth Corp. — have always been ambivalent. Siegelman spent more than a quarter-century in elective office, the only person ever to hold each of the state’s four constitutional offices (governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state). I usually voted for him, but I never warmed up to him. He struck me as a man of enormous political talents who had the potential to be a transformational figure in the history of Alabama but seemed more interested in simply moving up the ladder to the next office. Plus, I didn’t buy then and do not buy now the notion that a state-run lottery is the answer to all of our prayers (irony intended) for improving education in Alabama.

On the other hand, Siegelman was not without significant accomplishments in each office he held, as he was quick to point out last week while we dug into our entrees. You can read more about those in Tom Gordon’s absorbing account that begins on Page 6. I’m holding most of what I took away from the conversation for a longer piece on the demise of the Democratic Party in Alabama that will run later this year. For now, I’m compelled to use my space this week to try and synthesize some of my thoughts during and since our two hours with the former governor.

One image that stands out in my mind is that of Siegelman explaining the dynamics of disputed vote totals in Baldwin County in the 2002 gubernatorial election, when a late-night swing of 5,000 votes gave the victory to Republican Bob Riley and denied Siegelman a second term — during which, he said Friday, he would have pushed casino gaming through the legislature and attacked the daunting and long overdue tasks of reforming the 1901 Alabama Constitution and the egregiously regressive state tax system.

Pulling a pen from his shirt pocket, Siegelman sketched a Bell curve on the paper tablecloth as he spoke, casually displaying his instinctive nuts-and-bolts knowledge of what historic voting patterns mean relative to a given result. Of course, this was all tied into his insistence that the ’02 election was stolen and that his plan to reclaim the office from Riley in ’06 was derailed by a politically-motivated, highly selective prosecution whose origins ran all the way to the George W. Bush White House.

“They spent a lot of time and a lot of money in Alabama,” Siegelman said, “and it wasn’t because they wanted good government.”

The thing of it is, Siegelman’s conspiracy theory — pulling the likes of Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff and the United States Attorney’s office into his talk of selective prosecution, governmental misconduct, the critical difference between implied and explicit agreements, the idea that his case is a model argument for judicial reform — has about it an air of plausibility. Do I believe it? I’m pretty sure I don’t. Do I think it is possible that it went down the way Siegelman wants us to believe? Yes, I do — not because I believe everything Siegelman says, but because I know how politics works in general, and I sure as hell don’t have any trouble believing that Karl Rove would go out of his way to help send an innocent man to jail if it benefitted his side politically.

More than anything else, though, I was struck by Siegelman’s general demeanor. He was outwardly serene but with a nervous intensity in his eyes and voice that betrayed some unease about his immediate future. He is steadfast in his proclamation of innocence, driving his points home not with forceful language, but with the “on-message” persuasiveness of the professional politician. Tom, Steven and I talked about that on the way back to the Weld office, how maybe, at bottom, Siegelman has approached all of this — the effort to have his conviction overturned, the looming date of his incarceration, his intention to press his case for a Presidential pardon — as his last campaign.

Maybe it’s all he knows how to do, look for one more victory. He said he doesn’t regret not just taking his medicine when he was convicted and serving a sentence that would be up by now, that all of the emotional and financial expense of the appeal process was worth it regardless of the outcome.

As we were close to wrapping up, I asked Siegelman about his legacy, which regardless of any accomplishments he may fairly claim, is undeniably tarnished. Responding, he first fell back on the recitation of those accomplishments, but then stopped himself short.

“My legacy is what’s in my heart and mind, and how my kids feel about me,” he said. “The rest of it doesn’t matter, frankly. I enjoyed every minute of my public service, and I think the folks in Alabama benefitted from it.”

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write to him at mark@weldbham.com.

And I’m right from mine.

We’re both just one too many mornings

And a thousand miles behind.

—   Bob Dylan (1964)

It is upon us like a welter of locusts, the quaint quadrennial ritual of presidential politics entering its endgame. I already know how I’m going to vote, but that’s irrelevant here.

What interests me is a question that has been on my mind for some time. It has weighed on me more of late, as my distaste for the tenor of the campaign — dating back to the Republican primary season, by itself a low point in the history of public discourse — has me disappointed in my own preferred candidate and revolted with the other. The trough of fear and spite through which the 2012 campaign slouches toward Election Day grows deeper and darker with each passing news cycle.

The question, then, is this: Does it matter who wins?

Thinking about the answer to that question brings to mind some potential qualifiers, beginning with the brutal, barren fact that we live in a country that is fundamentally divided on the very idea of America. This division is not along two party lines, but is rather an expanding web of political fissures, widening rapidly along fault lines that are burrowed deeply into the national bedrock.

Judging by the level of our discourse, America is a nation of shouters and finger-pointers. Americans argue past each other, rapt in the zeal of delivering themselves of their own opinions, categorically loathe to accept even the prospective validity of another. They — meaning We — seek affirmation of their prejudices in echo chambers of like-minded ideologues. They treat honest differences of opinion as grounds for character assassination, if not worse. There is Right and there is Wrong and never the twain shall meet — except that it does, in the never-ending conflict over whose version of America will play against the backdrop of the next four years.

This endless election cycle has ill effects on the body politic. For one thing, it perpetuates a bitterly partisan atmosphere that greatly reduces the likelihood that any president — or, for that matter, the federal government as a whole — can succeed on anything more than a piecemeal basis (unfortunately, it does nothing to decrease the likelihood that a president might fail on a superlative scale). It also masks, or at least obscures, our collective apprehension of certain facts about our country and its place in the 21st century.

We can argue all day and all night about who’s to blame and why, but the fact remains: We’re in a tight spot. Or, to put it in terms to which most of us good Alabamians can relate, we’re getting well over into the fourth quarter and we need a touchdown. That’s no position to be in when nobody in the huddle trusts anybody else and everybody’s out for Number One. We fumble away another opportunity or two, and there goes the season. Hell, there goes the program.

Or maybe it’s not as cataclysmic as all that. Maybe it’s just that the country has grown too big and too divided to govern as such. Maybe the United States should split into a loose confederation of five or six republics, with boundaries determined roughly by predominant political philosophies and affiliations. Maybe our future could be one of peaceful coexistence rather than scorched-earth political warfare.

Or maybe we’re stuck with each other and just need to embrace that and make the best of what we have. On that note, maybe the thing to do is focus the preponderance of our political attention locally. The local level — the block, the neighborhood, the council or commission or legislative district — is by far the most immediate point of contact between citizens and government. It also is where the individual’s vote means the most, where the investment of engagement has the greatest potential to yield a tangible return. To steal yet another term of some residual currency, local politics is where the rubber meets the road.

Even so, I believe strongly that it does matter who wins the Presidential election. I believe that one candidate is clearly superior to the other, and that the outcome of their contest will have impacts in several areas of fundamental importance. I believe the term “economic recovery” will have a vastly different meaning and effect if my candidate wins than if the other man does.

What I do not believe is that someone who takes views opposite mine, or who votes for a candidate other than the one I support, is by definition an idiot, a subversive or a proponent of class, racial or economic warfare. Indeed, if the rifts in our nation are to heal, if we are ever to arrive again at a shared vision of what America is and should be, the politics of division must be subjugated. That happens one person, one group, one community at a time, until momentum for transformational change builds.

Which brings us back to the local level, our deeply divided little corner of this deeply divided big country. Even as we make our respective choices at the polls this fall, my hope is that we return our focus quickly to a future closer at hand and more within our command. I hope that we become habitually attuned to what might happen in Birmingham — in what we might accomplish here, together, building on the foundation of our innate strengths.

Mark Kelly is the publisher of Weld. Write to him at mark@weldbham.com.