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Pierce: What Kind of Country Is This Going to Be?
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14418742/roy-moore-election/What Kind of Country Is This Going to Be?
Walking the Edmund Pettus bridge, thinking about Roy Moore and John Lewis.
By Charles P. Pierce
Dec 12, 2017
"When we got to the apex of the bridge, all we saw was a sea of blue…Alabama state troopers."—Congressman John Lewis, on the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 7, 1965, Bloody Sunday.
SELMA, ALABAMA—I walked the bridge in the early afternoon sun. Traffic rattled and whistled by as though it were just another day on just another bridge. I walked up the steep pitch from downtown, surrounded by the weathered blue-gray steel of the span. The bridge is higher than I thought it was, coming to a peak over the dark waters and sandy banks of the Alabama River. You can’t see what’s down on the other side until you go past the peak, and then the view opens wide again. You can see whoever’s there, and they can see you, too.
There didn’t seem to be anything better to do on this strange December Tuesday, when Alabamians went to vote in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. There didn’t seem to be any better place to be. This has been an election haunted by history—of four little girls murdered by a bomb at Sunday School, and how one of the candidates, Democrat Doug Jones, ran down the last two murderers three decades later, and of Roy Moore, a retrograde judge and the perfect representative of that old Alabama that John Lewis saw waiting for him as he came over the top of the bridge that day.
John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is beaten by a state trooper in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.
No, this was the place to be on Tuesday morning, as Alabamians made a serious choice about what kind of state they wanted the world to see and, also, not to put too fine a point on it, what kind of country this is going to be, too. “This is not an election about who we want to be,” is the regular tagline of Doug Jones’s stump speech. “This is an election about who we are.” That being said, there was no place better to be than on the ground where the right to vote came down to mortal stakes, where Reverend Jim Reeb was beaten to death, and where John Lewis nearly was. You walk the bridge on a day like this because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
Over the weekend, Howell Raines, a native Alabamian from Winston County and the former editor of The New York Times, wrote a shrewd and lovely piece about how all that business about The New South skipped Alabama. On television, Raines attributed this to the long shadow cast by George Wallace over the state’s politics. While Charlotte grew cosmopolitan and Atlanta became The City Too Busy To Hate, Montgomery lay in thrall to backwards-looking white populism. In his Times essay, Raines brings this history to a sharp and lethal point. In electing President* Trump, the whole country took a ride back to George Wallace’s Alabama.
Alabama, as the only ex-Confederate state never to elect a modern senator or governor who was both progressive and never imprisoned, has seen more bizarre campaigns than any other state. Alabama’s much-ridiculed preference for officials regarded as unfit by the rest of the nation is embedded in tradition, but Mr. Trump’s success argues that this is now a national tic. He won with the tools that have cast spells on Alabama voters for two centuries: race, religion, hysterical oratory, intimidation of critics and economic three-card monte dealt by big-business hand jivers.
While crossing the bridge, you also can measure the damage done to the rights for which John Lewis and so many others suffered ever since Chief Justice John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee and took the guts out of the Voting Rights Act, the very law that a shamed Congress passed after the nation saw people being beaten at the bottom of the bridge. (The case was called Shelby County v. Holder, and you drive through Shelby County itself on the way down to Selma from Birmingham.) As soon as that decision was handed down, states began passing laws aimed at whittling away the rights that had been gained in blood on the bridge. Alabama, of course, was no exception, and all around the state all weekend, you heard African-American voters talking about how the state had passed a law requiring driver’s licenses and then shut down all the DMV offices throughout African-American majority districts. (“Budget cuts,” said the state, but nobody believed that.)
snip//
The bridge, then, led some people to more than violence. It led them to reserves of courage they never knew they had. It led them to a sense of being something bigger than themselves, and it led them to a world of opportunity that they couldn’t have seen as they walked up the steep pitch to the top, surrounded by the weathered blue-gray steel of the span. The bridge only takes you so far. We all have to choose where ultimately it leads us.
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Thanks - Rec 
