By: Zoltan Boka

I guess you could call me a former Southerner. My Southern credentials come from the three years I spent in west and middle Tennessee, with ocassional side trips to southern Oklahoma, a region at the heart of John Steinbeck's Depression-era classic "Grapes of Wrath." That novel, published in 1939, follows a man named Tom Joad, who is paroled from the Oklahoma state prison in McAlester and struggles westward with his family after they are dispossessed of their land by a California bank.

Surprisingly little has changed in McAlester since 1939. The roads are paved, but every bit as dusty as they were sixty-five years ago. The Oklahoma state penitentary is still the biggest employer in town. The Oklahoma state prison rodeo is still the big social event of the year. The houses range from functional to decrepit - for those who have houses, that is. The humidity-free summer heat is still unbearable. The population of greater Pittsburg county, which contains McAlester as its county seat, stood at 48,985 in 1940. By 1990 that number had declined to 40,581 according to Oklahoma census records. Of these 40,581 souls, Blacks number 1902 or 4.6% of the population.

McAlester is known as 'Little Dixie'. Its population still votes Democratic. All three Pittsburg county commissioners are Democrats, and its former GOP Congressman (McAlester lost its representation when Oklahoma lost a congressional seat) is a former Democrat. The people Howard Dean has said he wanted to appeal to - the guys with Confederate seals on their pickup trucks - are these same types of people. More or less poor, more or less lacking in higher education, more or less left out of the 21st century, most have nothing except their skin color and the false racial vanity instilled in them by one hundred and forty years (and counting) of racist, self-interested Dixiecratic politics.

The GOP sensed an opening with these people, and encouraged by Ronald Reagan (and now G.W. Bush), rank and file Republicans go to great lengths to appeal to the wounded racial pride of Little Dixie. Ronald Reagan gave speeches on the site of civil-rights era violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Trent Lott still waxes about the "good old days." George W. Bush stands by in approving silence as Bob Jones University spreads venom among South Carolinans.

Oklahoma does not differ greatly from Mississippi or Georgia, where white Republican governors prevailed by flying the treasonous flag of the Confedaracy and appealing to the worst the souls of their white constituents had to offer. (Georgia's newly-minted GOP Governor Sonny Purdue promptly fired many African-Americans hired by his Democratic predecessor.) In the meantime, national Democrats, instead of fighting tooth and nail against the easy out offered by Republicans, decided to write off a third of the country. After the 1964 civil rights act had forced the Democratic party to sever its ties to white supremacy (dinosaurs like the late Mississippi Senator James Eastland notwithstanding), the party gradually declined throughout the region, unable or unwilling to offer a ray of hope for a better future to the dispossessed white majority that saw its last claim to privilige slip away. The last time Democrats held a national convention in the South was their Atlanta appearance in 1988, where they nominated Michael Dukakis of all people, a man who seemed as though he had never been south of Nantucket.

Howard Dean, whether out of compassion or cold calculation, has signaled that he wants the people of Little Dixie to have a third option, beyond the failed Dixiecrats and the failing Dixiecans. He is betting that the South will rise to the opportunity to join the rest of the country in the 21st century and discard the old hatreds and politics driven by the false and fast-fading security afforded by illusions of racial supremacy. In this, he may be a man ahead of his time, or a foolish optimist. Running, as he may, against an autocratic southerner who has mastered the art of keeping discontented whites in his grasp by having subordinates signal his approval of their racial hatred-witness the recent Mississippi governor's race, which featured Haley Barbour defending the Confederacy and winning- Howard Dean is not likely to see a change in white Southern voting patterns and attitudes. But at least he is trying, which is more than what can be said of some in the rest of the Democratic party.

Zoltan Boka is a writer and consultant now living in New York City. He can be reached at zeev_2003@yahoo.com and he is the owner of an on-line clothing and accessories store at www.cafeshops.com/4Israel