Solutions for those 'left behind' in small town America

For Independence Day, I'm about to talk about small town America, the tragic/hurtful fix they are in... and some possible solutions. Though I'll finish with some fierce political commentary on the stated intention of Donald Trump to meet privately with Vladimir Putin, without any U.S. officials or other parties present. 

== Are small towns the soul of America? Well, then save them… right ==

First a telling statistic: there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use ... and the vote for Donald Trump.  After correcting for demographic variables such as age and race, researchers found that support for Trump in the 2016 election closely – and by very large multipliers - tracked opioid prescriptions.

Now, to be fair, a lot of this correlation could be chalked up to social factors and economic woes. Also, name a metric of moral and healthy living that is not worse in Red America, from teen sex to STD and pregnancy rates to obesity, dropouts, divorce and domestic violence, gambling and so on. Name an exception. 

Sure, it can be hard to tease apart cause and effect. Whether it's the poverty that leads to both pain and political rage … or if the political monsters who voters in these counties keep electing have been instrumental in keeping them in poverty and pain. Though the way local politicians bend over for big Agri-Biz and casino lords says plenty about the voters who elect them.

Given that the rest of the Union has poured hundreds of billions in aid and support into those counties, across the last century and a half – especially since FDR – the political rage that keeps electing lunatics and corrupt SOBs would seem suicidal... yet...

... there's a plausible reason. Deep-down, nothing imaginable could be more rage-inducing.  For 150 years in Red (or gray) America, each June, the good folk of every small town have seen the pride and joy of their community - their best and brightest high school graduates – scamper off to universities and city lights. Effectively to Mordor. To Sodom. Even when they return, they come home changed, with urbane attitudes and sophisticated ideas. 

Across human mythology, there is no story more terrifying than aloof, snooty, elfin creatures who steal your children. Or turn them into alien beings, into changelings. From this angle you grasp – at last – a root cause of the pain. 

Heck, I might pop pills, too.

Is that insight ironic, given their cult’s horrific recent behavior, stealing kids from immigrant parents, at the border? History and anthropology show many tribes did that, when when demographic extinction loomed… stealing the children of others, when your own have been taken from you.

This appraisal is supported by a study of political rage in small town America by Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist at Princeton University, who spent eight years interviewing Americans in small towns across the country.

"They recognize themselves as being left behind because, in fact, they are the ones in their family and in their social networks who did stay where they were. Most of the people I spoke to grew up in the small town they currently live in, or some other small town nearby. Often their children have already left, either to college or in search of a better job somewhere else."

This genuine pain is not culpable, because universities and their youth are made for each other and their kids have a right to grow. The larger beings they become aren’t monsters. Sure, they can be snooty, at that age! But it is a good thing, and don’t apologize. Our colleges and cities aren't Mordor. Mostly.

But at some level, we need to understand… and sympathize. Robert Wuthrow finishes with a caution:

"Point one is that rural America is quite diverse. People live in farm towns or coastal towns or mining communities, or they live in the North or the South or in Republican states or Democratic states. So we have to be careful about lumping people together under one category.

"Point two is that rural America does have real problems — population decline, a brain drain, opioid addiction, etc. We can make of that what we want. But that’s not the whole picture. Not every small town is full of people who are suffering and bitter and angry at Washington."

Yes, sympathize and understand. But I will no longer sigh and accept when I am told the urban and educated are less moral.  That's diametrically opposite to true.

== Solutions for small town America ==

So what can be done to ease this enmity, undeserved as it may be? The demographic problem is very real, as many small towns keep shrinking, feeding into a sense of gloom and doom.

One approach is to keep investing in infrastructure like high speed internet for rural areas (an Obama program), that would let more folks live in healthful rural dispersal while keeping urban jobs. Better transportation systems – e.g. hyperloops, efficient trains and (why not?) flying cars, will likely do the same.  Note that both call for willing transfers of wealth and technology, as Blue America has happily done since FDR’s time.

Some towns have navigated toward the future with a process called ‘shrink smart,’ re-inventing themselves for small scale industry or culture or tourism, providing jobs that their own college grads may want to return to fill.  

Another concept is combine-to-survive.  Three or four villages may have enough industry or farmers and services to support one in vibrant style. States could subsidize in-filling four into one.  

But won’t that leave several effective ghost towns?

Then why not turn lemons to lemonade? Truly, I am appalled that we’ve not seen more attempts to utilize near-abandoned towns for a wide variety of purposes.

- As attractive refuges for the homeless, offering spacious shelter at extremely low – and subsidized – cost of living. Many cities are investing heavily in new homeless housing, but the number of units is shrunk by the sheer price of building in a metropolis, when large homes are going begging, out in farmland. Oh, village life won’t be for everyone! Many displaced persons still want to dwell in urban centers, amid the bustle and job opportunities. But won't it be easier to help many of them if the savings truly went to services for the indigent, while rescuing a declining town from extinction. Should it be tried, in at least a few test cases?

- As communities for the undocumented.  Right now, the confederate right is justifying their insupportably vile and racist oppression of refugees fleeing oppression and death in their homeland with a talking point: that once these folks are registered and get provisionally released, they tend to disappear and never show up for their hearings.  While this is a gross exaggeration, the germ of truth could be eliminated, if refugees were released into a Halfway Village.

Not an internment camp!  But a pleasant place without walls and the potential for some work.  If they leave? Well, that becomes an assertive action and they’ll know that it won’t help their eventual case. I would oppose walls! Anyway, with a little help, who would need walls? (Have a look at what happened with the Hmong refugee community, that innovated exactly this approach successfully, on their own.)

- Okay, maybe you'd need some fences, for this next use #3.  A deceased rural village could make a good and cheap minimum security prison, where honor convicts live and work in a farm-and-town economy, getting practice and putting away savings for the outside world. Farms and businesses that barely failed in the regular economy might work just fine, if slightly subsidized by the State, as a hyper-cheaper means of incarceration. Other than daily roll call and a few extra cameras, what more security would be needed? The savings could go to psychological and transition services.

Can you think of other uses for a rural village or town that’s dying?  Remember that if the state buys up such a village, it raises property values across the county, and surrounding towns will probably benefit in other ways.

== Finding new leaders ==

Okay no reasonable suggestions will move a centimeter, so long as one of our political parties is pure treason, waging war against every single fact-using profession, at the behest of foreign enemies. So, we'll finish with some fierce politics.

Many of you have already seen this video  for another woman veteran of three Afghanistan tours, now running for Congress in Texas. Is this what we need? Hell yeah. Girl gotta go up! And no, that isn't the only mold. I'm fine with Santa Monica electing a Santa Monica liberal and Berkeley electing a lefty nut. I know some residually sane republicans... there are still a few... and I've urged them to run. But the battle, this round, is in the districts that Two Scoops is swinging into battlegrounds.   

These are places where decent folks need to be drawn away from the madness, And hell yeah, these ex-officers are our heroes. They are rising up to defend the nation they swore to serve, in the best possible way. And Rupert Murdoch is going to so regret turning them -- along with every other fact-using profession -- into enemies of his treasonously revived confederacy. 

Oh, the distinguished flying cross is no mere lapel pin. She's gonna use that corrupt, confederate SOB as a mop.

And hell, yeah. Give the folks who made this video a lot more to do.

== Here's why this is war ==

When President Donald Trump takes his first official meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin later this month, the two will spend a portion of that time alone, CNN reported Monday. The very same Kremlin-Politburu schemers who your uncles deemed satanic, when they wore hammer and sickle lapel pins,. are now okay guys, when they are billionaires wearing Orthodox crosses.

This must be screamed across the roofs of the world. Your mad uncles need to be told this is the final smoking gun... no, flaming gun. And they must choose - now - whether to be complicit in treason.

Trump's Divided America

This  reporter tried hard, for a week to live life with no reference to the President (read Farhad Manjoo in The NY Times).  But this mother of storms exceeds any combination of known attention storms. Sci fi offers a simple explanation.  He is an attention vampire. However many hate him... however little he actually accomplishes... an attention vampire will flourish as ever-more humans look at him, feel emotions about him, say his name.

== Crit that added weight to the other side ==

Hillary Clinton thought that the things that 55% of Americans and all the smart people found deeply offensive would pile up on scales against Donald Trump.  What could not enter her mind or other Democratic leaders was how many American saw Donald Trump's outlandishness not as a bug, but as a feature. The fact that all the smart folks were offended is what turned every outrageous Trumpism into a point added to his side. Indeed, they wound up being the only things necessary. The angrier and more upset we got, the better the reflexive response from what can only be called the Confederacy.

No other theory can explain why fundamentalist Christians rallied behind the most unchristian and most opposite-to-Jesus candidate ever to run for high office in the United States.  None of those traits mattered! Not so long as he satisfied the one great, rallying criterion: "Trump hates the same wiseguy nerds and lectury chiders I hate!" A shared enemy is all it sometimes takes. Indeed, it is the only diagnosis and explanation that correlates, across the board.

Anyone who thinks it was a decline in white middle class incomes has paid no attention to statistics or studies showing that many Trump supporters are doing just fine and - in fact - have done vastly better across the spans of Democratic administrations than Republican ones.   

So let’s get back to those post-mortems of why so many of our fellow Americans feel such rage at all their smart or professional neighbors.

== Some of it may be simple ==

Aiming to understand what drives white-rural or white working class political fixation must include some understanding of pain. Not so much financial or social, but physical. Pain of the organic-body kind. So writes Vinnie Rotondaro, in The science of white working class pain on Salon. And at one level or another, this should be considered. 

The underlying tensions, urban vs rural, liberal vs conservative, are covered in the Associated Press release: Divided America: The Fracturing of a Nation.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, in the WaPost, talks of how nostalgia for white Christian America drove so many Americans to vote for Trump

“In Andy Griffith’s rural North Carolina home town, people wish life were more like the Mayberry of TV… Seventy-four percent of white evangelicals believe American culture has mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s — more than any other group of Americans — compared with 56 percent of all whites, according to a 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. In sharp contrast, 62 percent of African Americans and 57 percent of Hispanic Americans think the culture has changed for the better, the survey said.  With his promise to “Make America Great Again,” Trump appealed directly to this sense of dispossession, and 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for him, according to exit polls.”

Recall last time how I referred to George Lakoff’s advice – ignored by the snooty Democratic Establishment – to pay heed to the “strong father” reflex that underlies so many of those who are rejecting the western enlightenment’s emphasis on a nurturing civilization.

== Oh, but there are other monsters ==


What stunning hypocrisy – one among hundreds – that the Republicans, having blocked for 8 years an infrastructure bill that would have stimulated economic growth, now, suddenly, are abandoning their commitment to fiscal responsibility and embracing this Keynsian notion. 

Why? Because they know it would work. They always knew infrastructure spending would work, which is why they did not want it happening during a democratic administration.

Is climate denialism a “pillar” of conservatism? It would seem so. And every day you wonder when the crazy will reach limits. Example. The polar vortex is slipping south again as our climate changes. Record cold will strike middle America, even as the Arctic thaws, under unprecedented high temperatures, without sunlight. If you are curious and sapient, read this informative article. If not? If you are a member of the hate-science cult? Welcome to the world you helped create.

No, everyone has it backwards.  They are not attacking science (and every other knowledge/fact profession) in order to undermine action on climate change. Rather, they have spread and pushed climate denialism as a cudgel for their main pillar and agenda: attacking science. And every other knowledge/fact profession that might dare to question a feudal oligarchic putsch.

Representative Mick Mulvaney, who was recently selected as the Trump administration's nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted “Do we really need government-funded research at all?” Yep, the one thing that doubled all U.S. productivity since World War II. Heck, the thing that enabled us to win World War II. We do not know the balance yet between the two traits most telling for Trump appointees. But those two chief traits are becoming clear. 

So… what’s gonna happen? Singer/thinker/SciFi reader Janis Ian suggests that Trump and Putin will join forces against China.  A tasty story… and unlikely, I think.  I doubt very much that the oligarchy wants anything like the super recession that a major tiff with China would cause. Though they do know they need something symbolic for the rallies.

I do expect some Potemkin "trade War" in which some tits for tat will be traded in pre-arranged ways that make both countries leaders look tough to the home audience. It will be tightly choreographed.  Those who dream of a Russo-U.S. coalition against China are dreaming.  Indeed, Putin is probably selling off Siberia as we speak.  We, too, will be sold. Alack.

AM I saying there won't be hot war? Are you kidding? Republican presidents always do war, big time. Democrats too, only their doctrine is to go surgical, as Clinton did in Bosnia. Republicans like pushing whole divisions around, and to hell with the cost.  Hence, I would put money on some scheme - some Gulf of Tonkin provocation - that triggers some shooting between the US and Iran. It would serve the needs of both Trump and the Iranian Mullahs, and especially Vladimir Putin. Heck, even the Saudis would foolishly want it. Though our own military wants anything but!

Highly apropos of which:  Day of the Oprichnik is a 2006 novel by the Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin. The narrative is set in the near future, when the Russian Empire has been restored, and follows a government henchman, an oprichnik, through a day of grotesque events. Notably, it foresaw a future when Russia’s only income would come from selling off natural resources including – piecemeal to China – most of Siberia. 

== AmericanNewsX ==

I sometimes cross-post to this brash site. And on occasion they get a bit melodramatic for my taste.  Still, their eagerness to fight back is evident and approval-worthy. For example:

Trump Will Be The Oldest President In U.S. History, And Why That Matters A Lot. 

  

The Evidence Is Growing That The Trump Dossier Isn’t “Fake News”. 

Obama The First President In 36 Years To Leave Office With A Diminished Prison Population.

And video shows a right wing provocateur with Breitbart connections as she tries to manipulate a liberal group into accepting bribes for acts of violence and disruption. Maass has previously been caught trying to infiltrate three liberal campaigns; those of Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton.  Memorize that face. Next time, do a reverse sting.

== Oh, lest we forget ==

Just in case you imagine I have forgotten the loony left, here’s an example of why that direction remains a very real (albeit much smaller and less immediately lethal than the mad right) danger to our enlightenment civilization. Are STEM Syllabi gendered? “The syllabi for college-level STEM courses—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are "gendered" because they promote the idea that knowledge can be ascertained through reason. This is a masculine concept that hurts women's feelings and makes it difficult for them to succeed…. that certain stylistic choices—command words like "will" and "must"—are inherently masculine and anti-woman, and then sets out to determine whether these words show up in STEM syllabi.”

Mind you, these indirect quotations of "Are STEM Syllabi Gendered? A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis" are taken from an article in REASON, a libertarian journal, sure to take a mocking response.  Still, this is exactly the sort of thing that is used by Hannity & company a bludgeons to imply that “both sides are just as subjectively biased” (i.e. crazy). 

No, they are not equivalent. The FAR left CONTAINS some dogmatic crazies. Your ENTIRE American right CONSISTS of such.

There is a difference between FAR and ENTIRE.  As there is between CONTAINS and CONSISTS.

Post-election: picking up the pieces

Okay, back to a general post-mortem: let’s focus on the election itself, starting with two quick dismissals.  This was not about working class pain, or racism.

Yeah, yeah, I hear your howls. And sure, maybe a third of Trump voters have some justified sense of grievance over jobs. Unemployment dropped dramatically under Obama and his near-record departing-popularity reflects this. But changes in the U.S. industrial landscape have resulted in fewer workers getting the high-class and highly-paid manufacturing billets their dads had. Sure, automation is far more to blame than outsourcing, and Republican oligarchs did far more to outsource than democrats. Still, there’s real pain there. Clinton should have addressed it better…

…and yet, less than a third of Trump voters were even remotely in that category. The rest are doing fine, economically. Many of them even know, grudgingly, that Democrats manage the economy better than Republicans do. Always.

No, their rage was cultural and psychological, not economic.

The same holds for racism. Yes, sure, it plays a role! And I hate it. And we need to fight it. And sure, maybe a third of Trump voters are affected by that poison. And many of the rest suffer from the new version -- lazy racism -- that has replaced much of the overt kind. White people who sit back, envision the scores of black and latino personalities they like, and the biracial couples they enjoy on TV, and conclude that means racism doesn’t apply to them. It gives them excuse to shrug and declare “racism is dead!” With the real, underlying complaint: “stop nagging me!”

        

Look, I accept all of that and again declare that we must fight it, as we fought, earlier, more overt forms of this disease. And we need to accelerate the trend that already began under Obama, of bringing manufacturing home. But let’s be clear… neither of these explanations for Trumpism correlate with all Trump voters.

I believe I know a better correlation. One that has an almost 100% overlap. But let’s hear from some others, first.

== Psychological theories – starting with Good vs evil ==

Why Rural America Voted for Trump: Robert Leonard, a New York Times reporter who grew up in rural Iowa offers perspective on the cultural divide between red and blue counties in the United States: 

“Political analysts have talked about how ignorance, racism, sexism, nationalism, Islamophobia, economic disenfranchisement and the decline of the middle class contributed to the popularity of Mr. Trump in rural America. But this misses the deeper cultural factors that shape the thinking of the conservatives who live here.”

This piece is flawed, missing several crucial aspects of “culture war,” such as the growling resentment that’s been spurred against all professions of knowledge. But some of the narratives that confederates tell each other do go back a long way, even to pre Civil War times, and we need to listen – in order to refute.

He quotes one Baptist minister: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that. We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.” He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”

This drivel is an example of the many narratives that are used, to justify a hate that boils and overwhelms any attempt at negotiation or conversation.  Nor are facts - such as pragmatic outcomes - able to penetrate. If we subtract outliers like Utah and Detroit and Chicago, name a metric of moral and healthy living that is not worse in Red America, from teen sex, STD and pregnancy rates to obesity, dropouts, divorce and domestic violence, gambling and so on. Name... one... exception. Other than abortion which is a disagreement over fundamentals. See also: Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

The NYT report implies that vast sums of money flow from red to blue America, when in fact it is largely the other way around. Indeed, as my family watches Bryan Cranston’s riveting depiction of LBJ, in “All The Way,” I am reminded of images from the America I knew, back when Trumpists claim America was great, when the South and Appalachia were synonymous with grinding, hillbilly poverty. Images that should embarrass those now screaming that “government never does any good.”

No, the source of Red America’s trauma runs deeper. 

What hurts is the annual brain drain. The fact that every June, at the local high school - the center of all life in rural towns - the brightest kids weep and hug and swear to keep in touch… then scoot as fast as they can to the universities and bright cities that thereupon, at a deep, psychic level, become associated with blandishment and the stealing of hope. The stealing of your children. But we’ll get back to that

Another claim is that the problem is generational. If only America could return to the 1950s again. The romantic personality is always drawn to wistful homesickness for a past that never was. See How nostalgia for white Christian America drove so many Americans to vote for Trump by Sarah Pulliam Bailey in The Washington Post. 

These romantic yearnings for a fabled fifties are insidious and it is vital to answer them. You’ll make little progress by talking about the racism and sexism of that period, not when some of these folks yearn for an era when everyone knew his or her place.  What you can do is tear to shreds their every assertion, as I did in my posting: Was 1957 America Better Than Today? 

Even better, point out that the Greatest Generation of that era voted for high taxes on the rich, joined strong unions, and adored, above all living humans, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

== The power of metaphor: dad vs. mom ==

Earlier I mentioned the brilliant master of language, George Lakoff, who tried to tell the Clinton campaign they were combatting Trump in all the wrong ways. 

“The Clinton campaign decided that the best way to defeat Trump was to use his own words against him. So they showed these clips of Trump saying outrageous things. Now what Trump was doing in those clips was saying out loud things that upset liberals, and that’s exactly what his followers liked about him. So of course they were showing what actually was helping Trump with his supporters.

“I tried to convince people in the Clinton campaign — early on, I wrote a piece called “Understanding Trump,” in March 2016, and it was sent to everybody in the Clinton campaign. Everybody at the PAC, for example, got a copy of it. It didn’t matter; they were doing what they were told to do.” says Lakoff.

Lakoff continues: “All progressives and liberals have a moral worldview, what I described as the nurturant-parent worldview. (But despite his many anti hispanic statements,) many Latinos voted for Trump. Why? Because “strict father” morality is big in Latino culture. The campaign was not looking at values. They were looking at demographics, and they missed the role of values.”  

Lakoff urged liberals to sell the notion that the “father” such voters need is the one composed of our common will, in fairly negotiated government, not a strongman caudillo, like Bush or Trump.  It is more abstract, but it could be sold, if Democrats would only try.  That would mean actually standing up for science and journalism and all the other knowledge professions. And yes, even the civil service.

Another psychological factor should be obvious, from the core character trait of the man these folks elected president. Pride is indeed key, and it takes a weird form, in Red America. Watch some of the riffs of the "Redneck Comedy Tour"… later re-named “Blue Collar Comedy Tour.” Seriously, rent some of the videos, in order to better understand. The humor is excellent! Endearingly self-effacing and self-mocking... only…

Only, after a while you realize, with a shiver, that all the self effacing jokes amount to a form of bragging. There's an implication, underlying every jest about good-ol' boy dumbness, that their fervidly passionate simplicity is more genuine, and "real," and vastly preferable over being a smartass college boy.

Indeed, I assert that this is what won Trump the election.  And I’ll explain next time.

== We coulda used a bit more Luther, or rather Lyndon ==

While we’re thinking about the most under-rated president of the 20^th Century... for those of you needing solace: watch Bryan Cranston's spectacular portrayal of LBJ in "All The Way." If he doesn't get an Oscar, there's no justice.

For decades I have fumed that no one would tell the story of Lyndon Johnson and all he did for our nation, refuting pathetically vile depictions by the likes of Oliver Stone. LBJ's loyalty to JFK's dreams was carried out with dispatch, passion -- and yes the ruthless political cunning this film so accurately showed. If you are shuddering over today's transition, imagine the majority of parallel worlds without the combination of JFK's assassination and LBJ's relentless push, where the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the '65 Voting Rights Act did not happen. The flames that would have consumed us, as our souls would likely have deserved.

Sure, there are red states where those rights are undermined by foul tricks, like gerrymandering. Indeed, we could certainly have done even better. But the playing field shifted, because of Johnson, to a better and more fair nation. And but for Vietnam, he would have crushed Nixon in '68 and we'd all have been the wiser for it.

Oh, is there an award for casting? Seriously, I never saw an array of actors who so looked like their historical counterparts! I recognized Humphrey, Dirksen, McNamara, Hoover and so on, at first sight, and the Martin Luther King role (played by Anthony Mackie) was perfection! Alas, this is all the movie that Hubert Humphrey will ever get. But most of us don't get movies. 

== Is that pertinent to today? ==

Maureen Dowd interviews Peter Thiel: "When I remark that President Obama had eight years without any ethical shadiness, Mr. Thiel flips it, nothing: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”  

Want irony? I kinda agree. I do wish Barack Obama had been slightly more like LBJ, with just a tad better instincts for the jugular and political knife fighting. His relentless attempts to negotiate with a cult whose central code — the Hastert Rule — was and remains to never, ever negotiate with Democrats, even for the good of the nation, seemed foolish and kinda pathetic after a while…

…though endearing, as the Democrats provided us with two 8-year presidencies that saw not a single administration high official convicted or even indicted for malfeasance of office. Dig that.  not one. Only the first and second times that happened in U.S. history.

That utter proof of honesty, combined with the utter fruitlessness of a 24 year, half-billion dollar endless search for something to pin on the Clintons, ought to affect any rational mind, especially in comparison to the endless lists of calumnies and crimes committed by both Bush regimes and (even before entering office) by the Trump Administration.

Oh, but the cult is immune to facts or irony. 

Here’s a test: any GOP lurkers out there, can you name one of the apocalyptic predictions about president Obama that came true? That even got broached or proposed by him? DHS internment camps? UN black helicopters? Swarms of henchmen confiscating guns? Forced abortions?

What none? Zero? And there's no embarrassment over there? None at all?

This is culture war. And the Confederacy is ahead. But Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory….

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