I've been reading about George Wallace, one-time governor of Alabama, and have been forced to begin changing my perception of him.
By the way, I wasn't aware that one of the first people to visit him in the hospital after the attempt to assassinate him in 1972 was.....dead ted.
I wonder what was up with that.
And funny, how the primitives never mentioned that in their memorials of dead ted.
Anyway, as a northerner, whose furthest penetration into the Deep South was to Louisville, Kentucky (it was hot that day, and so I immediately headed for the cooler climes of Ohio), I used to pretty much ignore George Wallace.
George Wallace now appears to have been a very complicated person, with many aspects of decency and good breeding in him.
This all of course is overshadowed by the media presentation of his early segregationist views. I'm getting the impression George Wallace didn't really dislike a certain portion of his Alabama constituency, that it was all a show, and of course it worked at getting him what he wanted, elected.
I'm getting a bigger impression of George Wallace as a Populist, and of course that warms the heart of any Plainsman (but for some reason chills the craven souls of the primitives)--the distrust of Wall Street and the northeast (well warranted), resentment of interference by know-it-alls from the federal government and well-financed outside "do good" organizations (we have to deal with that here in Nebraska too; I really despise the New England tree-planters who come here), and his hard-scrabble, work-hard, be realistic, attitude. His plain speaking (about non-racial matters).
George Wallace might have been a real piece of work, but by the time the work was done, George Wallace seems to me to have turned out pretty damned good, an exemplar of the imperfect, but utterly human, sort of man elevated somewhat above the common run of humanity, and of course stratospherically above the racist primitives on Skins's island.
