Defeat

People made a lot over an op-ed piece this weekend in The New York Time about the city of Clinton, Arkansas and Van Buren County. A local writer, Monica Potts, is working on a book about low-income women in Arkansas. Her piece was entitled, In theLand of Self-Defeat, and well worth reading. At its core lay an uproar over plans to combine two jobs at the county library and raise the remaining recipient’s salary. A Facebook poster, in what is becoming common in local government administration, whipped some of the local population into a frenzy, scraping scabs off whatever sores of social misery an individual might suffer and blaming it on the unfortunate librarian, or education, or taxes, or Hillary Clinton, anything but logic.

I felt the piece was well-written and thought-provoking. Here are some of the thoughts it provoked in me.

First, it carried a hint of inductive reasoning. Somehow, the actions created by Facebook postings may or not generalize into an explanation of why we now see Donald Trump in the White House, or why one party is now dominant in our state (it’s the same party that was dominate during my youth, just with a different name).

Also, I grow a little weary of pundits and writers talking about the “mistakes that Hillary Clinton made.” Here are what I believe are the major political mistakes that created our nightmare.

- Many Americans allowed two multi-billionaires (an Australian and a Saudi-Arabian) who own a cable channel to form their attitudes with a two-year TV smear campaign of lies, innuendos, and outright slander against Clinton, and praise of her opponent in a monstrosity disguised as a news channel.

- James Comey, caught between a “rock and a hard place,” chose poorly (based no doubt on which side he thought could do him the most harm) and sabotaged the Clinton campaign just days before the election.

- The campaign was unable to overcome a genuine feel of “Clinton-Fatigue.” Perhaps a simple “there are worse things” campaign could have helped.

But …

The biggest boulder in this landslide of misjudgment was that Hillary Clinton had served as Secretary of State under an African-American. Yes, a … well I won't use the word I heard so often to describe him. The bigotry test prevailed over the rational method. Sorry.

And if one is from Arkansas, one will have a hard time refuting that with a straight face. Remember the campaign flyers that contained neither platform pledges nor administrative challenges, but simply a big photo of the opponent alongside Barack Obama? Admit it, and then try to claim that logic of any sort resulted in our Electoral College votes, or set the stage for where our country finds itself at present.

The article covered other conservative shibboleths such as anti-education and anti-taxation. I don’t feel qualified to discuss those feelings for a specific city. I’ve only visited Clinton once. That’s when I was invited up after a devastating tornado had torn through the area. They hardly knew I was there. The local folks were too busy courting the FEMA reps who had arrived, with bags of money, to help.

In the final sense though, Clinton shares some of the same obstacles as other small towns in Arkansas. The reason for their original existence, whether it be trade, the railroad, tourism, or settlements for farm labor has disappeared. Along with this has come the lowering of income for middle-class workers. There simply aren’t enough people or resources to support a community facing the so-called “Retail Apocalypse.”

The hill country of Van Buren County, Arkansas offers a beautiful place to live, but little in the way of sustenance. The flat Delta country to the south offers some of the most fertile land in the world, but is a low, flat land, harsh in places, and deemed by many to lack the picturesque beauty that would attract new residents or businesses.

So small communities watch the world go by, while residents focus on such things as a librarian’s salary, whether or not education is, in the long run, good for society, or the color of a president’s skin.

Someone or something must take the blame.

We should be able to do better.