Go Set The Publicity Machine

     Not since the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma...way back in March...has Alabama received such a avalanche of publicity.

     The Media has been incapable of resisting the magical combination of The Deep South, racism, and the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. 

     I woke this morning to the sound of a familiar voice on the overnight BBC World Service. It was Auburn University history professor and author Wayne Flynt, brought out of retirement (as if he ever was retired) to discuss the new Mockingbird...Go Set A Watchman.  
     The interview was doubly appropriate. The good professor is a 30 year friend of Harper Lee...and was actually moved to move back to his home state from FSU after reading Mockingbird in 1965.

     From another son of the State of Alabama comes an editorial in the NY Times that touches on race and racism and politics. Former Times Executive Editor Howell Raines writes a future obit for the GOP here and in the rest of The Deep South. He writes that the party's future is forecast in the numbers, and that is has been for years:

"Like their peers in other regions, secular Southern whites under 40 care less than their elders do about cultural issues like flags, racial and ethnic purity, or private sexual conduct.

Even more dramatic changes in voter attitudes will shift the region’s party balance, to the detriment of the Republicans. This won’t come about because current Republican voters and their elected officials now in office will somehow be converted, but because they will be overwhelmed by new voters in the burgeoning Hispanic and Asian communities, who will join the black minority. Over half of the nation’s 40 million blacks live in the South."

     Another Southern historian, Emory's Joseph Crespino, writes, also in The NY Times, that Go Set A Watchman is as close to non-fiction as to a made-up story, at least when it comes to race in Alabama.