In his delightful crusade to demolish idiot U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Lucian Truscott recently shared a memorable anecdote:
I have a cousin on the white side of my Jefferson descendant family who did the world a great favor back in 1999 when I first took my cousins from the Sally Hemings side to the Jefferson family reunion at Monticello. The Monticello Association, the all-white group of Thomas Jefferson descendants who own the graveyard at Monticello, had just finished its annual meeting after the family reunion. The meeting was, not to put too fine a point on it, raucous, with white descendants shouting down black descendants when they tried to speak at the meeting. I had made a motion that the Monticello Association accept our Hemings cousins into the group by acclamation. A few white descendants countered with a move to table the motion until our next meeting, a year hence. That motion carried by the entire association voting yes with the exception of four Truscott members – my brother Frank, and sisters Ginny and Susan – voting no.
The press was waiting outside the door of the ballroom at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville when the meeting was over. I was answering questions from about 40 members of the press, including maybe a dozen or more television reporters who were there with their cameras and microphones, when one of my white cousins approached the group and began speaking loudly over me, trying to interrupt the interview. I moved aside and said that it seemed she had some things to say, so she stepped up to the bank of microphones. The first question was from a reporter for the New York Times. He asked what was the objection by Monticello Association members to accepting the Hemings family into the association.
“Ya’ll think we’re racists, but we’re not. We’re not racists, we’re just snobs,” she said, smiling.
Tuberville is no snob. He’s just a racist, as his campaign to enlist more “white nationalists” in the military has demonstrated. Tuberville has had Sisyphean difficulty in acknowledging that the term “white nationalist” has nasty implications. He finally did, sort of, but not really. I suppose that making your name as a football coach on the backs of unpaid black laborers still has a certain, peculiar resonance in certain retrograde precincts of the South. (Tommy coached at Auburn University.)
All of which would qualify Tuberville for little more than a plaque in the Melanin-Deprived Hall of Shame if he hadn’t convinced the voters of Alabama to elect him to the Senate, from which perch he has the privilege of blocking the promotions of ranking military officers. Which he has done. For months now. Because he believes the U.S. Military is “woke.” He believes this because the military allows its members to get abortions—and also because the military has practiced a mild form of affirmative action and allowed gay people to serve. Tuberville, thus, would have banned Alexander the Great and innumerable others from his army. This, at a time when the military is having serious recruitment problems.
The military is, polls show, the most admired institution in America—and rightly so, I believe. But apparently Tuberville, in his quest for a paler force, isn’t satisfied with just having the most powerful defense capability in the world. He wants to weaken it by stalling promotions, and changing its rigorous culture.
As regular Sanity readers know, I’m not a big fan of affirmative action. But it’s different in the military. For one thing, it is internal. Only troops who are already members of the force—who have passed the requisite academic, moral and physical standards—are eligible. The promotions are earned, competitive, though not always fair. (In my experience, the process is tougher on military intellectuals like H.R. McMaster—who was passed over several times until David Petraeus intervened on his behalf—than other worthy candidates.) Indeed, the military promotion regime—you continually have to prove your competence as you move up the ranks or you’re out—should be emulated in the rest of society, especially teaching, where tenure comes early and is near-impossible to lose even if you’re manifestly incompetent. The military process has been fabulously successful, producing an institution that, in terms of diversity, is the envy of academia and the private sector.
Now Tuberville’s ideological allies have led the successful campaign—in the House—to inflict his values on those who are willing to serve us. This includes blocking “green” initiatives, which have produced some real breakthroughs in solar and other forms of energy through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). But that’s a mere detail. It doesn’t appear on the radar, or sonar, of right-wing show-off politicians (and some military-phobic Democrats as well). The House bill won’t pass the Senate, but shame on them anyway.
On another military note, I am all for supporting Ukraine in its valiant struggle against Russian aggression. But sending the Ukes cluster-bombs is a bridge too far. Most countries consider them illegal, which they should be. If we want to set a higher standard of civility and humanity in the world, we should have no part of them.
more better news
Remember The Population Bomb? That was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller predicting demographic disaster. But Ehrlich’s bomb never went off. Overpopulation is still a concern in a warming world, but underpopulation is too, in places like Russia and China. People in advanced industrial societies just aren’t having as many babies; the birth control pill, introduced a few years before Ehrlich’s book appeared, didn’t factor in his calculations. A similar demographic fallacy predicted an astounding increase in the black prison population, but that’s not happening either. According to Charles Lane:
The hopeful findings about racially disparate incarceration rates emerge from a study to be published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Demography. It includes such remarkable data as the fact that, whereas 5,159 out of every 100,000 Black men were imprisoned in 1999, the rate had fallen to 2,881 per 100,000 by 2019 — a 44 percent decrease. In that period, almost every state saw a decline in its incarceration rate for Black men.
Nowadays black men are more likely to graduate from college than go to prison. They graduate from college with less frequency than white men—and with far less frequency than black women (who graduate at a higher rate than white men)—but this is progress. And the media has a bias against reporting progress. But not Charles Lane, the former New Republic editor, whose Washington Post columns are always worth reading.
And Even More Good News
All hail the American Exchange Project, which sends hundreds of high school students from red states to blue states (and vice versa) for a week each summer. It is a small, but rapidly growing, step in the direction of knitting our multifarious society closer together, which is a grand thing. The director and co-founder is Yale professor David McCollough. The other co-founder is my great friend Paul Solman of the PBS News Hour. But don’t trust me: take a look at a tv report from one of AEP’s venues in Portland, Maine. And send some money, or mobilize your local high school to participate next summer.
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My white Jefferson cousins are just more proof that racism isn't just pickup truck driving Confederate flag waving jabronis. It's alive and well in the suburbs, board rooms, and country clubs as well. Incidentally, the Monticello Association, having formally voted the Hemings descendants out in 2002 -- another lopsided vote, 95 to 6, with five of those yes votes being Truscotts -- has yet to change its mind and invited our Hemings cousins into the Association. Which is why I have had nothing to do with them since 2003. i attend Hemings reunions now.
Tuberville is an embarrassment to Alabama. And y’all should know that Auburn fired the “coach.” Can the Senate fire him???