Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER EIGHT: Invasions of Normalcy

233 chapter eight Invasions of Normalcy No, we will not allow Alabama to return to normalcy. —martin luther king jr., “Our God Is Marching On!” Across recent decades, growing numbers of Alabamians have ratcheted up their critiques of the Heart of Dixie. Their raids on normalcy have taken many forms, from gender and disability-discrimination litigation, to challenging inequities in the state’s tax structure and the funding of education, to creating a National Voting Rights Trail and confronting the tenacious ghost of George Wallace. Citizen groups bang against the constitutional gearbox where the state’s governmental machinery remains jammed. Black Alabamians continue to press for economic justice and statewide democratic inclusion. Activists of many stripes, as well as critical journalists, artists, and musicians, sustain the march toward a widening horizon. As this chapter suggests, the transformation of Alabama and its political imaginary proceeds along many fronts, lurching ahead here, stuck in habitual mud there, throwing off sparks one night, passing generational torches the next. Specters of Wallace “Perhaps the best way of encapsulating the gist of an epoch,” suggests Slavoj Žižek, “is to focus not on the explicit features that define its social and ideological edifices but on the disavowed ghosts that haunt it, dwelling in a mysterious region of nonexistent entities which nonetheless persist, continuing to exert their efficacy.”1 A frozen image in high school textbooks, a flutter of film footage sampled in tv documentaries and Hollywood flashbacks, George Wallace floats in history’s peripheral vision. Glimpsed at the corner of an Alabama eye, 234 • chapter eight the disavowed Guvner prowls long after leaving office in 1987 and the hustings of the living in 1998, his shadowy persistence troubling the state’s political imaginary. An indelible afterimage, Wallace stands, as Chet Fuller writes, “the sinister figure . . . in the doorway,” modeling defiance in a failed attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama in June 1963.2 Along with the interposition at Foster Auditorium, a second Wallace scene remains vivid for The Guvner’s ritual performance of official bigotry. In January 1963 Wallace stood atop the capitol steps in Montgomery at his first inaugural (where Jefferson Davis had taken the Confederacy’s presidential oath) and vowed “segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”3 Wallace’s reinvigoration of the theatrics of obstruction in the name of states’ rights lingers in circulating images and echoing words that continue “to exert their efficacy.” Churning memories, semblances of Wallace materialize anew. Alabama’s most notorious politician has become its chief haint, diminished yet indelible , a blurring tattoo, “encapsulating the gist of an epoch,” and a reminder, whenever familiar code words are uttered, of the persistence of the dilemmas he exploited. “Hauntology,” writes Christopher Peterson, elaborating a term of Jacques Derrida’s, “means to displace the binary opposition between presence and absence, being and nonbeing, life and death. Hauntology is thus another name for the spectrality that conditions all life.”4 In considering the dogged presence of The Guvner, hauntology puts a fresh face on death warmed over and breathes meaning into specters. Hauntology, in this sense, invokes not a dead Wallace but the intertwined social obsessions, inertias, and compulsions signaled by his presence—the Heart of Dixie habits still extant. Consider, for instance, Pat Buchanan, adviser to Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, and a candidate for president himself in 1996, lapsing into theatrics modeled after The Guvner’s as he stood “before dozens of television cameras . . . at the great gates of Charleston’s Citadel military academy and vowed that under his presidency no more women would enter that all-male institution.”5 Just as black Tallapoosa County farmer Ned Cobb taught that “all God’s dangers ain’t a white man,” George Wallace can’t take the rap for all of Alabama’s racist mayhem in the 1960s, nor all of the doorway stands today.6 He has, however , become a semantic touchstone that urges an investigation of the meanings and tenacity of Wallaceism, an Alabama export even in afterlife. Invasions of Normalcy • 235 Specters of Wallace are not Alabama bound, but await their casting calls into present dramas, sometimes speaking through unexpected voices. Backs to the wall, political candidates who know better can find themselves channeling The Guvner. Hillary Clinton, desperate for voters in rural West Virginia and Kentucky to fend off a surging Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary season, boasted of her appeal to...