I attended a meeting of one person and still ran forty minutes over.
MONTGOMERY, Alabama (The London Prat) – I have decided to keep today’s diary in the form of minutes, because I spent the whole day in the capital and I want it recorded that nobody here has ever finished a meeting early.
Call to Order
The meeting was called to order at the reading room door, a quarter of an hour before the archive opened, by a committee consisting of me, a thermos and a man in a bow tie who was waiting for the same door. We acknowledged each other as rivals. He was after tax rolls. I was after newspapers. The door opened, and the staff took our coats, our pens and, for a moment, our dignity, in exchange for pencils and white cotton gloves.
The matter before the committee was a bound run of newspapers from before the war, and I will say plainly what they contain. There are columns of politics, columns of prices, and columns of advertisements selling human beings and offering rewards for those who fled bondage. I read the whole page, always, and I keep the page in view in everything that follows. A diary can be light in tone without being light in subject.
Old Business: The Capitol Moves
Old business is always the capital itself. The Legislature sat in my home town of Tuscaloosa before it left for Montgomery in the 1840s, and the town has borne the loss with grace for roughly a hundred and eighty years, apart from the occasional remark at a funeral. Standing on a Montgomery sidewalk this morning I looked at the hill and felt the quiet, sportsmanlike resentment of a woman whose cousin got the better parking spot.
I also found, in a volume of the old almanacs, a piece of free advice that has outlasted its author. It advised the reader to rise early, to be frugal and to avoid debt. It was printed above a notice of a land sale. It is the most Alabama sentence I have read this month, and I copied it into my notebook with a note that says only “see Fed.”
New Business: Amendments One and Two
Having read in the past week about the school-prayer amendment in half the papers in the state, I turned to the two amendments that have received the least attention, which is the usual fate of the duller ones, and which means they are the ones I actually need to read. The Alabama Reflector’s rundown of the four amendments was the clearest I found.
Amendment One sets a method for filling a lieutenant governor vacancy that occurs more than sixty days before the next general election. It also lets the Legislature set the pay of the lieutenant governor and of legislative officers by joint resolution. I am in favour of knowing what happens when a seat is empty, and I would be even more in favour of a method for that in every committee I have ever sat on.
Amendment Two creates a process for county school boards to merge, with an impact study from the State Board of Education first. If at least a quarter of the registered voters in an affected county school system file a written protest, a majority of voters must approve the merger at the next general election. I read that three times, and I want the minutes to show that on the third reading I still wanted to know how many forms a person needs to file to protest, and where one gets the forms.
Public Comment: The Court Rules and the Early Votes Are In
At lunch, over a plate of fried catfish at a place across from the archive that was crowded with people in lanyards, the whole room turned to a phone. The Supreme Court had refused to let the administration set aside thousands of California mail ballots, as KTTC carried. The justices gave no explanation, which is normal for an emergency order, and no justice noted a public dissent. The administration had flagged about twenty thousand people as likely noncitizens on California’s voter rolls. California officials said the list appeared to contain many errors, and that about twenty-three million voters had been mailed ballots.
I will not argue the case here. I note only that this is a country where I have spent three years trying to correct a single misspelled surname on a utility account, and that when a list of twenty thousand names is questioned, my first reaction is the reaction of a person who has met the data entry department.
The same afternoon I read what NPR, by way of High Plains Public Radio, reported about early voting. Almost twenty-one million people had already cast ballots by the time that story ran, with about two million added in a single day, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. A political scientist quoted there said turnout was up on the last two midterms. The reporter added, wisely, that early data is often a poor guide to the result. I would add that it is a perfectly good guide to how many people were tired of waiting in the cold.
A Fable in the Margin
Between pages I scrolled past a farm.fm piece whose headline has a farmer’s corn getting rich while he goes broke, which has the structure of every moral tale in an old reader. Corn prospers, farmer does not, and nobody ever asks the corn what it did. I read it twice. The old almanacs would have printed it as a proverb and added a recipe.
My editors at The London Prat have a habit of sending me British news told with a straight face on days like this, and a piece on what commentary is and is not, in the hope I will stop reading newspapers from before the war. I have replied that I will stop when they do.
Adjournment
The archive closed at the hour it said it would, which in this city counts as a personal triumph, and I left with four pages of notes, one pencil I should not have kept, and a strong feeling that tomorrow is going to be long. The motion to adjourn was moved by my feet and seconded by my back, and carried unanimously.
I drove home to Tuscaloosa with the radio off. You can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat, where nothing has ever been adopted by acclamation.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/