Georgia on My Mind
I’m watching and reading about Georgia…again…about that voting law.
As you know, on January 5th, the people of Georgia voted in two Democratic U.S. Senators (who just happen to be a black and a Jew) and bam, their Republican run state legislature, in response to the loss, got right to shoving through a 98 page bill of “recalibrations” of their state election laws (they wrote all on their own) to stop “irregularities” (Irregularities like blacks and Jews winning national office in Georgia).
Is this surprising? No. Is it disgusting? Yes.
In the news, we have to listen to a bunch of horseshit about how the Republicans say this isn’t targeted voter suppression. We have to hear about how it’s really “expanding” some rights (“Hey, kids! Look at all the expansion!”). We get to hear about how progressives are blowing this out of proportion and “lying” about what’s in the law. We get to hear Georgia Governor Kemp, the “great mind” behind this law, make whataboutism arguments about New York election laws as some flat-headed distraction from the evil he is doing.
On March 25th, Kemp signed the law in a closed office and state Democratic Rep. Park Cannon, a black woman, was arrested and charged with 2 felonies for knocking on that closed door in protest. Inside the Governor’s office, as she was being dragged off in handcuffs, we saw the Governor signing the bill flanked only by white men…under a painting of a slave plantation…no women, no minorities (that I could see in the pictures).
I want to take a moment to remind you of who Gov. Brian Kemp is. Here’s an instructive video he made and paid for himself. Please watch it…
That commercial should be a parody…it isn’t. I’m sure Kemp thinks it’s funny…it isn’t. What it is is threats of violence thinly veiled behind a sinister, derisive grin. Think of it along the lines of how the statement “You boys don’t look like you’re from around here.” would be considered by people of his ilk a “jest”…until you don’t leave…and then their guns come out. See? It’s funny!
This ad is infamous for the part where he talks about “rounding up” “illegals” to take them back to their “home” in his truck…which he does just a couple of seconds after he showed us his large and diverse firearms collection (He likes diversity in firearms…people not so much).
Let me ask you, how do you think Kemp would herd those “criminal illegals” on to his little dick truck? What if they didn’t comply? What would he choose from his arsenal to force them to comply? The explosives? The firearms? The chainsaw? Inquiring minds want to know.
Speaking of chainsaws…Look at the flags on the building behind him when he is revving his beloved chainsaw at the camera. You see that Georgia state flag behind him? I’m going to touch on that flag real quick and then I’ll get back to Kemp.
The 2003 Georgia state flag is a hate symbol. I know what you might be thinking…that you might not see it. I’ll explain.
Everyone knows the “Confederate flag” popularized by the KKK and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This flag, as popularized, was not the actual national flag of the “Confederate States of America”, and never was. It is actually the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. You would know them as the army led by General Robert E Lee.
The actual national flag of the “Confederate States of America” was a different flag that went under many revisions. The revisions that came in 1863 started to incorporate the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag into the design. However, prior to that, from 1861–1863 the Confederate national flag is basically identical to the current Georgia state flag, which was adopted in 2003. The only difference between these flags is that on the Georgia state flag the Georgia state symbol is placed in the center of the circle of 13 stars.
The 2003 flag was the eventual replacement of the 1956 Georgia state flag that dominantly featured the Confederate battle flag in its design.
So, 65 years ago, 1956, Georgia’s leadership, in response to Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Movement, desegregation, and calls for the end of Jim Crow, exclusion and lynching, chose to adopt the KKK flag as their state flag…to salute their heritage. Today we call that “doubling down”.
Eventually, at the start of the new millennium, MANY YEARS after the segregationists lost, people, who today would be called the “cancel culture” or “SJW” movement, demanded a new state flag…ya know, without the hate symbol.
This was an issue during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, where flying the Confederate Battle Flag over our international event was not considered a good look. As we remember, there was a deadly domestic terrorist bombing at that Olympics, perpetrated by some trash Christian-white-supremacist nutbag. But that’s another story.
Anyway, Georgia’s solution to the flag issue was to change the flag from the KKK favored flag design to a more obscure symbol of the Confederacy…Turn it into more of an inside joke.
This is the kind of “fix” you can depend on from the Georgia State Legislature.
Just like this current “expansion” of voter rights they have rolled out to “secure” the electoral process from “discrepancies”. It’s a classic Georgia State Legislature “fix”…As in “The fix is in”.
It’s all horseshit. It needs to be called out and fought hard.
Brian Kemp…that shit-heel contractor from Athens…he knows exactly what that Georgia state flag behind him really represents. He knows its origin. He became a Georgia State Senator in January 2003, the year that shit flag, with its secret-decoder-ring hate symbol, was adopted. He is proud to have that flag on his building. He is proud the flag is such an accurate symbol of his “heritage”.
You think for one second I’m going to trust a motherfucker who presents in this way with adjusting election laws in Georgia? With his track record as Georgia Secretary of State? You think I’d trust he would ever do anything to help minorities access their voting rights. You think I’m going to buy one thing that asshole has to say?
No.
Fuck Brian Kemp.
He needs to be sent back to Athens.
Fun fact, he’s up for reelection in two years…Gee, I wonder whose election he’s trying to “fix”?
These Georgian Republicans knew the spotlight was on their state. They jammed this legislation through knowing the eyes of America were on them. They knew that if what they were proposing was truly and openly debated it would have fallen apart under scrutiny and under the pressure of public outrage. They knew the law was a slap in the face of all voter rights activists. They know the history of their state, and what that history represents. They knew all this and they did it anyway. They did it and they stared right in our faces while they did it and they didn’t blink. Just like Derek Chauvin staring right into that cell phone camera.
And we bicker about it…missing the forest for the trees…Some people are so stupid, I swear I think they ARE trees…Some people have their face buried so deep in a live oak, they can’t see the forest for the tree…One tree!
To these people I say, “Zoom out! Get some fucking perspective! We are talking about FUCKING Georgia! First or second place in total number of lynchings depending on the list! Yes, that’s the state were talking about!”
But don’t judge them on their love of their “heritage”. Right? Christ!
Living in Atlanta must be like living in West Berlin.
Here’s the deal. Georgia has a significant struggle ahead. This isn’t going to be over soon. Every time these Republican shitheads fuck up it makes the trouble worse.
Georgia is as chock-full of “good ol’ boys” as any southern state you will find. If their chosen leaders, like Kemp, keep pointing them down the path of the “Lost Cause”, and they keep happily marching down that path, there will be consequences. That shit don’t play anymore. The nation is watching.
The front lines of the battle of the Civil Rights Movement are all over Georgia. They still are. This war ain’t over, sorry Justice Roberts.
Every time I see that stupid fucking Georgia peach logo in the credits of a movie, I’m uncomfortable. I think, why is the California entertainment industry so greedy that they have to send their productions to Georgia just to skirt their local tax responsibilities? But on the other hand, you want to believe that this interaction (even if it is based in taking money out of the bank accounts of California businesses and California tax pools) might cause some progressive “Hollywood” culture to rub off on Georgia in the process. You want to think that our business with Georgia might be used as leverage to push things in the right direction when they fall into old patterns.
But what do you do, what leverage do you flex when Georgia’s white “conservative” leadership starts to show their Confederate ways?
Stacey Abrams, who to me is the popular national expert on this issue, says don’t boycott the state yet, because the people who will feel the most direct negative financial effect are the very people we are trying to protect and empower. She understands that it’s complicated. Instead, she calls for putting the pain on corporations that fund the Georgia Republican Political machine. A machine that promises corporations they will always “work to lower taxes and ease burdensome regulations”…Corporations LOVE that shit! They will eat that all day long and take it with a heaping side of white supremacy if no one’s looking. Abrams wants to make sure we are looking. She wants to make it unpopular for these big corporations to associate with and fill the campaign coffers of the white supremacist assholes currently running the show in Georgia. She wants to make that association toxic to corporations who profit from the oppressed.
On the other side, you have #ExPresidentShithead calling for the boycott of all corporations or organizations who dare to criticize this new Georgia election law.
And the wagons circle and the culture warriors are activated and sent to battle. And the whole thing becomes a “story”…and the injustice, historical and current, just gets sidelined for the “show”.
It ain’t a show. It is either the death pangs of White Supremacist rule in Georgia or it is the South rising again. There is no in-between. We are traveling on one road or the other. Do not fool yourself.
We just have to look at the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020 near Brunswick in Glynn County, Georgia to know this isn’t just some SJW/Cancel Culture situation in Georgia.
Too many journalists and commentators are getting the voting law story wrong, unwittingly giving cover to the White Supremacist/Good ol’ Boy power structure in Georgia. These are the headlines… “Biden got a fact wrong”…“The activists are exaggerating”…but keep reading and you’ll get to the part about how the law is in fact voter suppression. But that clickbait, bullshit topline framing gives the Right Wing spin machine all the ammunition they need to play their game with the “story”. I hear the Fox pundits already “Even Bezos’s Washington Post said Biden is lying and gave him four Pinocchios”. That isn’t the story fucktards. The story is the Georgia owner class is up to their old tricks again.
Georgia’s owner class is not forgiven for its history…or it’s present. They are on probation for as long as they need to be on probation. Just because their Secretary of State didn’t give in to Trump’s requests and threats and overturn the 2020 election results doesn’t mean shit. Thanks for the tape, but you’re still not trusted. You’re more like a criminal informant at this point.
Here’s the deal. I’ll make it really simple to understand…if Stacey Abrams isn’t happy with the law, I’m not happy. Make her happy and we’re good. She’s the litmus test.
Right now, she ain’t happy, so there’s work to do.
The problems in Georgia are dire. There is only one acceptable solution. Georgia’s Republican State Legislature must actively and directly collaborate with voter rights advocates to replace the problematic law they forced through and replace it with one that will make Stacey Abrams tell us something along the lines of, “Nothing is perfect, and there is still work to do, but I think we can live with this.”
Until we get there I don’t want to hear “centrists” talking about this situation like there is some kind of nuance that I’m missing because I’m just too woke.
That good ol’ white boys club, who just lost, ain’t getting away with rewriting the election rules by themselves. Sorry. It won’t stand. America won’t stand for it. It’s time for good trouble in Georgia, and a lot of it.
Postscript
I just want to talk a little about Jimmy Carter, our President from Georgia. To me, he is a great American. I’ve quoted him in my writing. I’ve often said I wish he would have won reelection in 1980.
That said, Jimmy Carter was Governor of Georgia while their state flag was the Confederate battle flag.
He has a very weak take on why he lived with that flag. He problematically opines that he thinks “very few” Americans see that flag as a hate symbol…Showing he’s had his head buried deep in those oak branches for a long time. For a while, he’s called for all state flags to be Confederate battle flag free, which is good. But his reason for his stance, that he only really feels this way because the Confederate battle flag upsets black people, is shit. When asked about Georgia’s current Confederate based state flag, he deflects…He is also weak on confederate monuments, like Stone Mountain…It’s disappointing. He’s stuck on “heritage”.
But I can still admire this man, even with his faults. Hey, at least I can admit he has faults…I can admit I have deep reservations about his faults.
I knew someone who visited Carter’s family peanut farm in Georgia way back in the early seventies. He didn’t think they treated their migrant workers particularly well. Any time I would bring up Carter in conversation he loved to hit me with that. And I believe his story.
But I can still admire Carter.
And I bring this up for a reason. This is the trick with dealing with even the most decent white people of Georgia. People much like Jimmy Carter. The indoctrination of white southerners to be sympathetic to the Lost Cause is just too strong. It’s maddening. It’s insidious. It’s dangerous.
How do you break them from that unacceptable thought pattern? A thought pattern that (no matter how decent it thinks it is) tacitly allows toxic, exclusionary, evil, even murderous ideologies to flourish unchecked in its presence in the name of “heritage”.
How do you face the reality of this fault in their mindset and keep them as friends and allies? How do you keep your respect for them?
I don’t know.
This is the dilemma of our times. The dilemma of division.
But if the pattern keeps repeating (as it has in Georgia), and the pattern is unacceptable (as it is in Georgia), then there has to be consequences.
And if we lose some friends…even good decent people, who just refuse to get “it”…Well, then that’s just the way it had to be.
That’s the way it’s going to be for a while.
