The Alabama Ex-Patriot Movement (by Al)

Each memoir is a manifesto. It begins when a writer (or even a person who is not yet a writer) decides that he has something to say that needs to be said, whether or not you, dear reader, want to hear it. It may be as simple as an assertion that “People shouldn’t be treated that way,” or “Boy, is that stupid behavior, or what?” Perhaps it’s something as aggressive as “This is the way it is, and I don’t like it!” Something as provocative as “These people are betraying their region, and all the beliefs their country was founded on.” Something as compassionate as “I hope we can keep others from going through something like this.” Or even something as simplistic “Don’t do that!”

And I confess: as an ex-patriot Alabamian, I have had all of these feelings about my home state. The love/hate relationship that I have seen in so many of my fellow Alabama émigrés is a complex node of anger, compassion, nostalgia, incredulity and dread – of what they will do next, that seems to be reinforced every time I receive a dispatch from my home state. Every time they have an election and choose a person whose lack of qualification for office are so obviously manifest (Fob James and Guy Hunt jump immediately to mind), or whose main avenue to power is their family name (Jim Folsom, Jr., George Wallace Jr., and Lucy Baxley, to name three), or choose someone because their parochial and backward-looking views brought them national attention (George Wallace was simply the first; Jeff Session and Roy Moore are the latest incarnations). I cringe. I had hoped, against, hope, for better.

The state’s reputation is like a wall, and every time I try improve it by behaving as someone who is not “like that,” I find my efforts undermined by the next brick-headed politician, the choice of whom they use to plaster and mortar over the hole some many of us émigrés have dug out. I don’t want my home state to forever be the laughingstock of the country, the place where obsolete attitudes about gays and creationism and the like go to hide during the interregnum before being reborn.

And what’s most frustrating – I know the good heart that beats inside the typical Alabamian. The care for neighbors, the helpfulness that is instinctively offered toward strangers who are in trouble (at least the ones who look somewhat like the person who is extending himself), the absolutely genuine desire to love God and live a good life. I know that is inherent in the way people are brought up there and who they want to be. Some types of generosity and good-heartedness are almost competitive sports in Alabama. On a day-to-day basis, the care and solicitude have a sweetness that puts their iced tea to shame.

And yet they are defending something that I find indefensible. At first it was slavery, then racism, then on to homophobia and intolerant Christianity, which when combined seem to total up to a nostalgia for a retro-bucolic way of life that is anti-Modern to its core. It jumps from one issue to the next – when one fight is so obviously and irretrievably over, the indefensible defense chooses the next place to make its stand, to find another rock ledge to hang on to for dear life, to keep from falling into the abyss of Progressivism that seems, in the minds of retro-Alabamians to threaten everything their state stands for. The state’s motto – translated from the Latin as “We dare defend our rights” – is there for a reason.