Month: November 2023

The city of Birmingham has thrown a rope to Birmingham-Southern College, a forgivable loan that will provide enough bridging money to see out the current academic year and (possibly) make it to next August, which provides runway to get the current students graduated and buy six months to raise the rest of the money for next year. In the grand scheme of things, it resembles nothing so much as the Tom & Jerry cartoon with the cat frantically setting down one piece of track after another in front of his speeding train, and I honestly don’t know what is going through the mind of students at this point. Although anyone who doesn’t have a plan B in mind is an idiot, because this is a degree of instability that’s going to be hard to overcome.

One thing I didn’t know is that Kyle Whitmore – one of the two best reporters working in Alabama today, along with John Archibald – is an alum, and he has revealed some interesting information. One is that remarkably, BSC’s tuition is actually lower than the University of Alabama’s at the moment, and that with a higher minority percentage than they have at Tuscaloosa (truly shocking in my day, when a Black male student was either a basketball player or a theater major). The other is that apparently the biggest financial hit came from the makeover that was undertaken in the mid-2000s, and they burned a big chunk of the endowment for things like the bell tower dropped in the middle of the academic quad, or the new “welcome center” or the new enormous pond on campus or, famously, a football stadium for a team that hadn’t played football since 1939 and had never shown any particular interest in resuming it.

BSC is down to around 700 undergrads, which is mighty cozy. That’s half the size it was in my day, and I can only assume that with a depleted enrollment and a student body that size, capital improvement is a long long way off (then again, when you don’t need half your dorm space any longer, I don’t know what you do to monetize the physical plant. Not like you can cash that in) and you’re going to have to win over students with what you have in front of you. Which, after a year and a half of circling the drain, is kind of a busted flush.

It would be a fitting end for BSC to die as a result of suffocating itself by climbing up its own ass and never finding the way out. I have apparently done a good enough job burning my tracks that no one has come to me looking for a handout, and I don’t intend to float a penny to remediate the mistakes of the institution that was itself the single greatest mistake of my life. I am sympathetic with the argument made by the Alabama state treasurer who glories in the government name of Young Boozer III, who asserts that the plans BSC has don’t add up to financial viability, and I don’t see how throwing another $30 million at the problem is going to raise the $100+ million they will need on top of that to return to viability. It’s entirely possible that the institution has just plain run out of track at last.

It rather begs the question of what is BSC for. We’ve batted this around before, but the Methodists already have a perfectly cromulent liberal arts college with division-III athletics, and I know this because my nephew is a redshirt offensive lineman for them. Birmingham already has small colleges – there’s Miles, which stood to inherit BSC’s campus back in 1976, and there’s Samford, which is…a college (although if BSC is a conservative-arts college, what must a Baptist equivalent be like). And there’s UAB, the state’s largest employer and a cornerstone of the whole community in a way that BSC…isn’t. Or wasn’t, anyway. The extent to which Mayor Woodford represents them is a remarkably generous gesture on his part, in my opinion, and as I have said before, a revitalized BSC that was a genuinely Birmingham college would be a lot easier to look kindly on.

I guess we’ll see. Hugh Martin ‘30 wasn’t wrong to write “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow”, though. Of which.

The fundamental fact of American politics in the 21st century is that the Republican Party feels entitled to wield power irrespective of whether they can get the most votes. The GOP had the White House for 20 years out of 24 before Clinton won, and felt hard done by that they lost in 1992. And then the South arguably had the White House for 20 years straight – from 1988 to 2008, if you accept the Bush family identity as Texan – and felt doubly hard done by to lose it to a Black man in an election where neither party’s ticket ever featured anyone from a state with a star on the Rebel flag for the first time since – 1968? Maybe?

So in 2008, the GOP-South alliance took a loss fair and square and took that as an existential threat, and has ever since bent all its power to denying the result at the ballot box by whatever means possible. And if that meant embracing conspiracy and falsehood and steering into anti-democratic values and tactics, so be it. QAnon? Fine. Blocking the ability of a President to appoint a Supreme Court justice for a year because of the election coming, and then whipping one through in two weeks when it’s your turn? Fine. Open violence in an attempt to thwart the affirmation of the electoral results? Fine. Threatening the full faith and credit of the United States repeatedly, shutting down the government repeatedly, installing an open Christian Dominionist two heartbeats away from the White House? All fine.

The enemy is here. It rejects electoral constraint, unwritten rules, good faith even-handedness and shame, and our media and politics is not set up to cope with an openly anti-democracy force controlling one of the two parties. And we have a fifth column in the press that insists that racism, ignorance and bad faith are valid viewpoints that must be accepted and accommodated, that the most Christofascist people are “moderates” because they haven’t yelled at anyone, and that you don’t like Democrats and look at how unpopular they are since you don’t like them.

There is a very real chance we are not going to get away with this one. And I don’t have a plan B for what happens if we don’t. I ran as far as I could from Alabama, and if it takes over the country – and make no mistake, the bullshit you see in Alabama and Tennessee and Virginia and everywhere I’ve run from is explicitly and openly what is coming in 2025 if the Republicans win – if that is triumphant, I don’t know how to deal with what happens after. Everything in my being screams “sell the house, sell everything, move to Ireland and hide” but that isn’t really an option – especially since there is a handful of people very close to us who will need all the help and protection we can afford them if things do go wrong.

But there are so many points of failure. It’s not enough to re-elect Joe Biden, or any Democrat – you have to also run up sufficient numbers of Democrats in Congress that you can break the chokehold of the cowards and the backstabbers and still have enough votes to do useful things. Like shred the mechanisms that allow one single Senator to bring everything to a halt. Like doing what is necessary to rebalance a Supreme Court that has three Trump appointees after Democrats only had five in the last fifty years combined. Like ensuring that the victory goes to the candidate with the most votes, instead of putting a 3% thumb on the scale for Republicans thanks to shithole fleaspeck states with half the population of just one Bay Area city. And you have to make sure that loaded rigged Supreme Court can’t cut the nuts out from under you.

And you have to get the votes. Despite all of this, you have to convince Ed Earl Brown that democracy is on the ballot. You have to convince young people that it’s not a one-and-done solution and that you have to accept that you’ll be moving the ball down the field your whole life. You have to convince extremely-online leftists who shit the bed in 2000 and 2016 that harm reduction and preventing disaster is more important than their feelings and “heightening the contradictions” and that a whole lot of people are going to suffer and die waiting for their great gettin’ up socialist morning. You have to get people to keep charging up the hill over and over in the face of incremental gain and constant setback and a news machine that will normalize the worst in humanity and say “why you bringing up old shit” as soon as someone other than Trump is at the top of the GOP.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. It’s going to be one part learning to love the struggle, one part radical acceptance and four or five parts antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. And a whole lot of living with the fact that the lesson of the 21st century is that one Black man as President was enough to make White American lose its shit permanently, and there may just be no coming back from this country’s foundational sin.