by Tom Lowe
December 29, 2002
Trent Lott....
It is as though that toupee has been around forever.
Stationed in Oklahoma in 1972 with the Air Force, I first heard about Lott when he was elected to Congress from the most Nixon-leaning congressional district in the nation.
Just who was this man? It was difficult to grasp him as a person. He seemed utterly bland, uninteresting, and empty. Whenever I read about him I came away unsatisfied. It wasn't that Lott seemed to be concealing anything about himself; what you saw was what you got, except perhaps that nasty side that any seeker of power tries to conceal. Like Gertrude Stein, I couldn't find any there there.
Lott came from what seems to most Mississippians a foreign county called the Gulf Coast, a Catholic area in a protestant fundamentalist state, a bootlegging honkytonk area in a formerly prohibitionist state and a district heavily dependent upon the war industry. It went without saying that he was a crypto-segregationist who disguised his beliefs in the language of political conservatism, like all southern politicians of the time who wanted to be elected. By 1972, open racism was no longer something to which the middle or upper classes in Mississippi could conveniently admit. For one thing, the 1965 Voting Rights act was having its effect upon the racial makeup of the electorate, and blacks were often the swing vote between the Republican and the Democrats.
But the white population of the state was still deeply racist. I remember around that time hearing over and over again from whites who ought to have known better that the "nigras" were lazy and wanted to be supported without working in a federal welfare paradise. John Bell Williams, a former congressman who had been stripped of his seniority and committee chairmanships for supporting Goldwater, was elected governor in 1967 precisely because he pandered to those sentiments. I would hope that the irony of history repeating itself is not lost on Lott, since he supported Williams in his gubernatorial bid, but I doubt it; an ironic sense is the last thing one would expect of him.
It is indeed difficult to imagine the level of denial of which the average Mississippian is capable when it comes to his prejudices about society, politics, and race. Facts simply don't count. The overwhelming evidence, accumulated over 135 years--that our zero-sum, poverty-producing, mean-spirited, racist politics is counterproductive and self-defeating--is of no consequence whatever when weighed against our tightly-held habits of thought.
I let myself be seduced as a teenager by this appeal to the "southern way of life," expressed so eloquently and convincingly in the sweet-sounding, euphemism-laden Mississippi drawl that can gloss over even the ugliest realities. I read with approval Carlton Putnam's Race and Reason, a pseudo-scientific justification of segregation popular in the south at the time. It wasn't until my freshman year of college, when I heard precisely those same racist sentiments in a New Jersey accent that I suddenly became aware of the pervasive injustice of what we called "the southern way of life." And then, during the summer after my freshman year--the long, hot summer of 1964--I was forced to reflect upon the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County by klansmen, including county law officers. Not even the smoothest, most euphemistic language in the world could justify or even soften the evil of those horrendous murders or the fact that I was a member of a society that was capable of such monstrosities. I began to change fast, as did many Mississippians.
After five years in college and graduate school and four years in the Air Force, I returned to Mississippi in 1974 to find the state changed in many ways. Legal segregation had ended. The newly-enfranchised black voters voted Democratic and most of the whites, formerly Southern Democrats, found the Republican party, with its skillfully disguised appeals to racial prejudice, a haven. Trent Lott was the beneficiary of that change.
I first saw Lott on TV when he was a member of the Nixon impeachment committee. Whenever Lott's turn came to speak, I remember him saying a few meaningless sentences and yielding to someone else. That should not have been surprising, as he came from the most pro-Nixon district in the nation, and was carefully calculating the resonance with the folks back home.
What I did not realize at the time, was that the art of political polling had become such an exact science, that a whole new type of politician was arriving upon the scene, of which Lott was an exemplar: a politician whose beliefs and ethics were so "flexible" that he could, in all sincerity, tell the people precisely what they wanted to hear, even when he knew that he was lying. Polling science had empowered the perfect political chameleon, a man without any principles beyond the acquisition of power and influence, a man who will say anything that will get him votes. Before polling, many candidates attempted to feed the public what they wanted to hear, but that was usually impossible beyond a few major issues. Outside of the big issues most politicians said what they thought and many said what they thought about the big issues, too. There was some choice.
Our nation's history over the past fifty years supports the conclusion that polling has caused the platforms of the candidates to converge. Each candidate has supporters who will vote for him no matter what; there will also be voters who will never vote for him. He can safely ignore those two groups and strive to attract the undecided voters in the middle. Since each candidate knows the opinions of that undecided electorate from his pollsters, the candidates say what is calculated to attract those very voters, which requires that they deliver virtually identical messages. The "debates" between Bush and Gore in the last presidential election were proof positive that convergence has arrived. Their messages were, for all practical purposes, the same.
I was living in Mississippi when Lott first ran for senator. His advertisements were packed with outright lies about what he had done as a congressman for the handicapped and elderly, just as the recent ads for Chip Pickering, purportedly being groomed as Lott's successor, were laced with falsehoods claiming that he opposed the privatization of Social Security. It is disgusting and disheartening to see these gimmicks work. They work because Mississippians want to believe them.
Over the years, I have searched for signs of real principles in Lott's speeches and writings, ideals that he holds, things in which he really believes with a passion, and signs of noble aspirations, but have invariably come up empty. When I scratched the facade I found nothing but the passion for power and prestige, the most addictive and vicious disorder that has ever infected the human species.
Lott's sudden fall, however, has more immediate origins. This is not the first time he has pandered to the old southern right wing; after ignoring Lott's previous record in this respect, the media have now recalled Lott's previous addresses to the Council of Conservative Citizens and his association with right-wing publications, even though it was common knowledge long ago. Lott's fellow Republicans knew it quite well, but since they were benefiting from the subtle race card, they were perfectly happy to let it go.
My sources who have known Lott report that shortly after Dubya was appointed president by the Supreme Court, Trent decided, for reasons known only to himself, that he would no longer act the nice guy in the Senate. Now that he had the power of majority leader (this was before Jeffords deserted) and a president of his own party, he suddenly became ruthless, the tyrant of the Senate, who no longer had to be nice or to grant favors. The first casualty of that change was the loss of the Republican majority in the Senate. Jeffords, a moderate Republican from New England, clearly felt that he had been abused by Lott's high-handedness and that there was no point in remaining in the party.
Apparently, Lott refused to learn the lesson, even after he was about to be returned to the majority leader post. The only conclusion a reasonable observer can make about his thoughtless (but probably sincere) remarks is that he believed himself to be untouchable. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make proud.
That his remarks about Thurmond were sincere and directed to the latter's segregationist stand was betrayed by his frantic attempts to repudiate his segregationist past, instead of sensibly concentrating upon other, less obnoxious, aspects of Thurmond's Dixiecrat platform which included states' rights, anti-Communism and a smaller national government. Instead, Lott panicked, and revealed to the nation a side of himself that he had heretofore reserved for special occasions in rural Mississippi.
Most senators are unquestionably prima donnas; any majority leader that forgets that, no matter how great his power, he is first among equals, will find that when he desperately needs the support of his colleagues, that support will not be forthcoming. When Lott found himself in the middle of a media firestorm, he found his supporters in the senior chamber to be pitifully few.
Lott's fall was not tragic. Tragedy requires the fall of a virtuous person due to a "tragic flaw" that arises out of those very same virtues. It requires a sense of loss, and with Lott, there is not much there to lose. He avoided military duty during the Vietnam War, the most serious military conflict in the latter half of the Twentieth Century; he successfully campaigned to keep his national fraternity from dropping its ban against blacks; he rode into Washington on the coattails of Richard Nixon and his mentor William Colmer, an arch-segregationist. He never worked for any appreciable time at a real job in the private sector, nor did he ever have to meet a payroll; his congressional career was neither creative nor courageous, but consisted mostly of kissing the correct posteriors to ascend the rungs of leadership and sending coded racist messages to the folks back home so that they would reelect him. He turned out to be little more than a Big Man on Campus.
In the end, there's not much point in blaming Trent; we elected him. Shouldn't we be blaming ourselves for electing a man so obviously mean, selfish and empty of everything but ambition? Did we, by any chance, elect him because he is such a faithful reflection of our own selves?
Perhaps we should be examining ourselves.