Mike Pence And Lester Maddox
This is a repost from 2015. In the five years after, Mike Pence has served as Vice President of the United States. In the post was this sentence: “It is highly unlikely that anyone will know who this Pence person is in forty four years.” Political predictions are risky.
Salon posted a festive piece the other day. The headline: “Indiana’s Mike Pence is starting to look like Lester Maddox — without the spine.” What about the Governor’s breast, thigh, and wing?
Mr. Pence is the media punching bag of the moment. In a few days, someone else will screw up, and the nabbering classes can pick on someone else. The riffraff law will be lawyered out in the courts.
The question here is the connection to the former Georgia Governor. It turns out to be a rhetorical gimmick. In the first paragraph, author Joan Walsh essentially repeats the headline. “… even before Pence began to look like a 21st century Lester Maddox — without the spine.” This is the last time Lester is mentioned. He is used as a bald headed Honey Boo Boo.
It is ironic that Lester is this famous, forty four years after his term in office ended. There are many bad things you can say about Mr. Maddox. However, Georgia survived both him, and smiling Jimmy, as Governor. It is highly unlikely that anyone will know who this Pence person is in forty four years.
The second part of this feature is a previously published piece about Lester Maddox. PG was twelve when Lester was elected, and has many memories of the four years that followed. The post goes into some of the mixed feelings, and tells a couple of stories. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
There has never been a politician like Lester Garfield Maddox. He was elected Governor of Georgia (with help of a quirk in the state constitution) in 1966. PG was 12 at the time, and saw the spectacle of the next four years with amazement.
Before we get started on this, we should remember a couple of things. Lester Maddox became notorious when he shut down his restaurant, The Pickrick, rather than serve a black customer. He was a segregationist, which means he did not want black people to have the same rights as white people. Looking back from 2020, it seems incredible that civil rights legislation was needed, 56 years ago, so that 30% of Georgia could eat in a restaurant. PG does not condone the actions, and attitudes, of Lester Maddox, or the people who supported him.
There is style, and there is substance. While the substance of Lester may have been horrible, the style was a sight to behold. He could ride a bicycle backwards, and did so whenever a crowd was there to watch. (PG saw this at halftime of the Peach Bowl.) Lester was on The Joe Pyne Show and The Dick Cavett Show, and walked off of both.
This section from a previous post tells one story. The Governor was speaking to a group of reporters. He was announcing the appointment of a Black man to a Selective Service Board.. The reporter said it was the first Black man to serve on a draft board since reconstruction. What did the Governor think about this? The Governor said “Gee”
The screen returned to the Channel Five newsroom. The men at the desks were all laughing. The weatherman looked up at the camera and said “That’s a tough act to follow”
Whatever you might say about Lester Maddox…and there is no shortage of bad things to say…there has never been a public official that entertaining. As for being a tough act to follow, the next Governor was Jimmy Carter. As for the weatherman, PG saw him in a parking lot once. It was raining heavily. The “Gray Ghost” looked at PG with an ironic smile, as if to say “I am sorry”. The weatherman, Guy Sharpe, is on the right in the picture below this post. He is signing a book.
In 1970, the Governor of Georgia could not succeed himself. Lester ran for Lt. Governor, and spent the next four years feuding with Governor Jimmy Carter. Lester ran for a second term in 1974, and was trounced by George Busbee. (The slogan: “Elect a work horse, not a show horse.”) When Jimmy ran for President in 1976, Lester made a point of badmouthing Jimmy. In his own way, Lester Maddox helped Jimmy Carter get elected President.
Lester appeared on the Joe Pyne show. Lester was later on the Dick Cavett show. Another Cavett guest was Truman Capote. After Lester walked off the show, Mr. Capote said, in his own inimitable way, “I ate at his restaurant one time, and all I have to say is, it was not finger licking good”.
Still Packing In Crowds
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Some Megachurches Are Still Packing In Crowds
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A fatal overdose, a stunning coincidence, and a mother’s long quest to heal.
I Heard in the Shell by James Broughton, Rialto Theater (Atlanta), November 9, 2013
Inside cooperative store. Gee’s Bend AL Marion Post Wolcott, 1939 May.
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Weekends are Wilde! Lady Windermere’s Fan by the Virtual Theater
glitter up ~ do right thing ~ blackbirds ~ metric conversion ~ Rogan discovers kudzu
#TerribleQuaratineAdvice ~ GA education fraud ~ worldmeter ~ the freezer door ~ pete rose
please kill me ~ hiv stats ~ do the right thing ~ Henry Mancini ~ cv-19 test
Tom Waits is a guy who probably has a song that I would like but I don’t want to go find it oh I guess probably like one or two songs for one song pick a fucking song here a lot of you pick a song and it sounds like he’s taking a shit ~ completely take over other trees at least it looks okay it looks it looks dope but he’s it’s weird dude it’s ~ @AdamHSays Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 47, and post the fourth sentence. Don’t mention the title. @chamblee54 Judy had an elegant gold-and-white suite overlooking Boston Common gardens and pond. ~ of all of the presidential candidates that were in the race like everybody has dropped out and as well which of them would you want in a covid situation? – Tulsi – Tulsi that’s by the way that was my answer as well I don’t I didn’t want her foreign policy that’s one of the reasons I wasn’t like gung-ho ~ Keith Jarrett is an odd piece of work. I saw him at the Great Southeast Music Hall. I sat down too close to the stage. I found out after the show that he was giving me dirty looks, because I disturbed his concentration. ~ what do you think would happen If some guy gets Corona and he’s got it fucking bad systems are shutting down this is it he’s gonna die and he wants to have sex again but he doesn’t want to get anybody sick so he fucks his dogs oh my god and then like all the symptoms go away and he realizes like he’s found the cure and now he has this moral obligation like does he call the CDC and say hey I’m kind of embarrassed to tell you guys this but I think I cracked it and what if it’s only his dog but if everybody has to come to his house and fuck his dog ~ @chamblee54 @robertwrighter @kausmickey I’m getting a little sick of the guy myself ~ pictures today are from The Library of Congress. ~ selah
War Stories
Recently, when I went to McDonald’s I saw on the menu that you could have an order of 6, 9 or 12 Chicken McNuggets. I asked for a half dozen nuggets. ‘We don’t have half dozen nuggets,’ said the teenager at the counter. ‘You don’t?’ ‘We only have six, nine, or twelve’ ‘So I can’t order a half dozen nuggets, but I can order six?’ ‘That’s right.’ So I shook my head and ordered six McNuggets. (Once, I asked for sweetener, and they only had Splenda and sugar.) This is a repost.
Several years ago, we had an Intern who was none too swift. One day she was typing and turned to a secretary and said, ‘I’m almost out of typing paper. What do I do?’ ‘Just use paper from the photocopier’, the secretary told her. With that, the intern took her last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five ‘blank’ copies.
A mother calls 911 very worried asking the dispatcher if she needs to take her kid to the emergency room, the kid had eaten ants. The dispatcher tells her to give the kid some Benadryl and he should be fine. Mother:’I just gave him some ant killer……’ Dispatcher: ‘Rush him in to emergency right away’
I was checking out at the local Wal-Mart with just a few items and the lady behind me put her things on the belt close to mine. I picked up one of those ‘dividers’ that they keep by the cash register and placed it between our things so they wouldn’t get mixed. After the girl had scanned all of my items, she picked up the ‘divider’, looking it all over for the bar code so she could scan it. Not finding the bar code, she said to me, ‘Do you know how much this is?’ I said to her ‘I’ve changed my mind; I don’t think I’ll buy that today.’ She said ‘OK,’ and I paid her and left.
A woman at work was seen putting a credit card into her floppy drive and pulling it out very quickly. When I inquired as to what she was doing, she said she was shopping on the Internet and they kept asking for a credit card number, so she was using the ATM ‘thingy.’
I recently saw a distraught young lady weeping beside her car. ‘Do you need some help?’ I asked. She replied, ‘I knew I should have replaced the battery to this remote door unlocker. Now I can’t get into my car. Do you think they (pointing to a distant convenience store) would have a battery to fit this?’ ‘Hmmm, I don’t know. Do you have an alarm, too?’ I asked. ‘No, just this remote thingy,’ she answered, handing it and the car keys to me. As I took the key and manually unlocked the door, I replied, ‘Why don’t you drive over there and check about the batteries. It’s a long walk….’
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
Critical Becky Studies
Becky is a generic insult for *some* white women. If you don’t know what a Becky is, you might not understand the feature below. Chad is the equivalent expression for *some* white men. He is not important enough to be studied critically. This is a repost.
It started out with a tweet, about a symposium, Critical Becky Studies: Critical Explorations of Gender, Race, and the Pedagogies of Whiteness. Soon, PG was googling CBS. The paywall protected Wall Street Journal had an article on CBS. The seminal article was at City Journal, Racial Resentment As Pedagogy. The CBS flap originated at 2019 AERA Annual Meeting, sponsored by American Educational Research Association.
@chamblee54 @CityJournal @maxeden99 There was no link to this event in your article. I suspect this is a hoax. Please provide a link to the location on the event guide, for “critical becky studies.” The AERA conference guide is a confusing academic labyrinth. After a while, PG clicked on the correct link, and found a way to search for whiteness pedagogy.
CBS is real. “In the tradition of speculative fiction, parable, and counterstorytelling within critical race theory, this session aims to problematize the characterization of “Becky,” a term specific to white women who engage whiteness, often in gendered ways. This characterization is relevant to education by critically examining who is Becky and how she is characterized, her positionality in education, and how the hope for diversity, inclusion, equity, and racial justice within the P-20 educational pipeline is impacted by Becky. … tied to the gendered and raced mechanisms of whiteness enacted by Becky. ”
The symposium featured the presentation of several papers. If, after reading this feature, you want to learn more about these papers, you can follow the links.
This Ain’t No “Wizard of Oz,” Becky “The chapter is a parable in the spirit of speculative fiction, about the fictional (mis)adventures of Becky in the land of Ny as she faces obstacles that she can only overcome by grappling with her own whiteness.”
Two Woke Beckys? “Although both Sheila and Erika slip into different whiteness performances during their conversation, including passive aggressiveness and tone policing, white innocence, and white saviority, they check each other and delve into how they each have and are employing whiteness, despite their desires to rid themselves of whiteness, albeit through different means. …”
Love in the Time of Beckyism “… a particular white heterofeminine citizen-subject popularly known as “Becky,” … Despite “progressive” commitments such as equality, and social justice; and sentimental responses to historical atrocities and current social events, these (conditional) protestations made by Becky serve as a hedonistic mechanism for image management that hinges on the exploitation and social death of people of color. …” How can a teacher preparation program work to rethink the episteme and ethos that socializes Beckyism?”
Book Club Becky: White Racial Bonding in the Living Room “Many liberal white women gather monthly for book clubs … This paper reveals the more insidious workings of these spaces, as they are places where white women bond in order to maintain their place in white patriarchy, what Christine Sleeter named white racial bonding. The conversations that take place, the women who are included as “educated,” and the spaces where they meet are laced with white supremacy and surveillance.”
Border Becky “… why white women still invest in whiteness. Using the term “Becky” establishes an academic backing that can be applied and analyzed when researching the pathology of whiteness. … whiteness manifests in classrooms riddled with white women seeking to prove how they are not like other racist white people. Becky in the counterstories demonstrates the character-like roles white women play in a white supremacist folklore.”
It was a busy weekend for whiteness pedagogy. Ekemini Uwan shocked a Christian conference with her remarks about whiteness. “So then when we talk about white identity, then we have to talk about what whiteness is. Well, the reality is that whiteness is rooted in plunder, in theft, in slavery, in enslavement of Africans, genocide of Native Americans, … It’s a power structure, that is what whiteness is, and so that the thing for white women to do is you have to divest from whiteness because what happened was that your ancestors actually made a deliberate choice to rid themselves of their ethnic identity and by doing so they actually stripped Africans in America of their ethnic identity. … Because we have to understand something – whiteness is wicked. It is wicked. It’s rooted in violence, it’s rooted in theft, it’s rooted in plunder, it’s rooted in power, in privilege … ”
“Inter city beauties, Atlantic City Pageant, 1925” illustrate this feature. These images are from The Library of Congress. We do not know if any were named Becky. UPDATE @chamblee54 I found the link. My apologies for doubting you. @maxeden99 No worries. I couldn’t have made it up if I tried :)
Anthony Stephen Fauci Part Two
Q&A with Dr. Anthony Fauci ran on C-SPAN January 8, 2015. Anthony S. Fauci M.D., Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke with Brian Lamb. This interview was a primary source for Anthony Stephen Fauci. Today, we will look at other quotes from that interview. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.
Many people criticize George H.W. Bush for his performance during the AIDS horror. Dr. Fauci takes a different view. “Yes. I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know President George H.W. Bush from the time that he was vice president. And when he was getting ready to run for president, he sincerely wanted to know more about this strange disease called AIDS, because quite frankly and disappointingly … President Reagan, who was a good man, did not, I believe, use the bully pulpit enough about calling attention to AIDS. … George H.W. Bush felt that this was important. So while he was still vice president, he came to the NIH and wanted to meet me. He said, “I want to meet this person, Fauci, who I see around doing all this with AIDS, to show me around.” … And I spent considerable amount of time with him, introducing him to my patients, talking to him about what HIV is, and we struck up a friendship. … And then when he became president, it was wonderful because I had a direct input to him. … He’s a wonderful human being.”
Lamb “And what happened to SARS ?” Fauci “SARS essentially disappeared. SARS came, we isolated the virus, we started to make a vaccine, which was successful. It looked pretty good in an animal model. And then all of a sudden, pure public health measures suppressed it, and it went away. … It was one of those diseases that are very common, which is a disease that’s fundamentally an animal disease, and it jumps species from the animal to the human. And sometimes it’s trivial and nothing happens and one person gets infected, but sometimes it adapts itself to the human, and it spreads from human to human. That’s what SARS did. .. But once you suppressed it, it essentially stopped. Because the next one that jumped into human didn’t have the capability of spreading easily from person to person. So we dodged the bullet with SARS. We did.”
Lamb “Ebola. How does that look now?” Fauci “Well, from the United States’ standpoint, it looks very good. We had a situation where a person came over inadvertently, not knowing they were infected, was infected, went to a hospital, infected two nurses. That created a tremendous degree of concern and panic. … And what we try to do … was say, “We’re taking this very seriously for sure. But given our health care structure here and the ability to suppress the spread by identification, isolation, and contact tracing, this is not going to happen in the United States the way it’s happening in West Africa. We may get a case or two,” which we did, “but we’re not going to have this out of control outbreak.” And if you say it enough and give the good scientific evidence for why that’s the case, people believe it, and as it turned out, that’s exactly what happened. There’s no Ebola right now. We may get a case that might come in, but we’ll be able to handle it.”
Lamb “Lots and lots of money was spent on the flu vaccine, and it isn’t working.” Fauci “Right. Well, it’s not working optimally. That’s for sure. Because each year, you make a calculated guess based on information that you gather of what’s circulating towards the end of the season of your season and what’s going on in the southern hemisphere.”
Lamb “Who makes that guess?” Fauci “World Health Organization. And they have to make that decision in February of the prior season, because in order to start manufacturing the influenza vaccine, it takes about six months, so that by the middle to end of the summer, it’s ready. You start distributing it into fall, and then it’s ready for the winter season. .. At the time the decision was made for this 2014-2015 season, they thought that this particular strain of H3N2, which is a designation of certain types of influenza, would be one type. As soon as they started manufacturing the vaccine, about a month and a half later, it became clear that the virus was drifting, and that means mutations and drifting, so that by the time you got to the flu season, the majority of the strains didn’t match what was in the vaccine.”
Fauci “Now that’s the bad news. The somewhat comforting news is that you still can get good benefit from vaccination even though there is not a perfect match, because there’s what’s called cross protection. So if I get vaccinated against an H3N2 that’s not the exact one that’s circulating in the community, I could still get a certain degree of protection. I might not be protected against getting infected, but I might be protected against getting serious disease or hospitalization.”
Lamb “What is your number one concern way out there?” Fauci “Well, my one- number one concern way out there is the idea of emerging and re-emerging infections that we haven’t been exposed to before that’s spread by a respiratory route. So pandemic influenza that’s really serious is something that bothers me, and that’s one of the reasons why one of the real priorities that we’re working on right now in my institute is to develop what’s called a universal influenza vaccine.”
Fauci “A universal influenza vaccine is one that you can take once or a couple of times in your lifetime, and it would cover all the strains of influenza. So you don’t have to play this guessing game each year where you have to change your vaccine … and keep getting vaccinated every year. If you can get a universal flu vaccine, where you give it a few times the way you would give a measles vaccine and forever be protected, or a polio vaccine and forever be protected, that’s the thing we need to do.”
Chamblee54 
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