Awake, good North Carolina, from the reign of the zombie kings

These should be pretty good times for North Carolina, which has always been a hard-scrabble state. For sure, the recession still hurts, the manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back fast enough and the small towns need help. But the cities are doing fine.

Charlotte hosts national political conventions and a Super Bowl team and is headquarters to the country’s largest bank and utility. Triangle universities won two Nobel Prizes in the last couple of years, and almost two national basketball championships. Raleigh and Charlotte top every national list of desirable places to live, work, have a family. Millennials and retirees alike love Asheville and Wilmington. Over time, the efforts of many, and some good luck, have made the poor state of my birth if not rich, then pretty middling.

It wasn’t always this way. When I moved back in 1985 after a near-decade in the northeast, I strained to find a good restaurant, an interesting building, a winning business idea. The cities themselves weren’t even that: Charlotte was a truck stop with banks; Raleigh, some government buildings surrounded by shopping centers. Still, those of us who loved the place saw possibilities everywhere.

I came back for those possibilities. In the Research Triangle, we called it hi-tech. We wrote business plans drinking bad coffee in recently vacated cow pastures and said, yeah, this is going to happen. Our friends in Boston and Silicon Valley said we were nuts. Then it happened. In Charlotte, guys in suits had a different dream. They stopped calling what they did banking and called it finance. People in London and New York said they were nuts. Then that happened, too.

Along with good luck, we had good government. It was a secret weapon the folks in Boston, and Silicon Valley, and even New York and London noted admiringly as we moved up. The state was able to compress a century’s progress into decades in part because Republicans and Democrats alike presided over an eco-system where the universities, the banks, foundations, creators, entrepreneurs all worked together when they needed to and kept out of each other’s way the rest of the time. It didn’t matter what your political views were as long as you played fair and didn’t want the credit.

A system to emulate

I remember meeting with a Republican governor, whose name I won’t say because he didn’t want the credit. Some of us told him that there wasn’t enough venture capital and that it would be useful if the state could set up a small fund. Banks in Charlotte could contribute and get a tax break. Our entrepreneurs would get a leg up.

The governor listened, drummed his fingers on his desk in the old Capitol and pronounced it a good idea. He said it would save time if he called the bank presidents himself. The legislature wouldn’t be a problem. It all took about a half-hour, and with lightning speed in political time the money got invested.

This system worked so well that people came from all over the world to study us. I talked one time to a Japanese scholar, writing a book about the secrets of prosperity. He put chapters in about something he called the North Carolina Ho-Ren-So. Later, I showed a more skeptical Russian journalist around RTP. He asked what happened to the farmers when the pharmaceutical companies seized their land. It was just after the fall of the Soviet Union, and he wasn’t all that checked out on capitalism. I told him the farmers got money, and their kids went to college and found good jobs, maybe with the pharmaceutical company. He took photos with an old Polaroid.

So many seasons of discontent

Somehow, we didn’t take care of that system, and it died. These times, which should be pretty good, have proved to be a spring, summer, fall and winter of discontent. Our current Republican leaders, unlike the old ones, have no interest in working with anybody. Passage of the anti-LGBT, intolerant, repressive bill called HB2 illustrates this full on. Like some big karma payback, bad government now drags us down. Incredibly, Republicans criticize “job killing” regulations and then pass a bill that costs 400 jobs in Charlotte and 250 in Cary, threatens hundreds in Durham, hammers the High Point Furniture Market, kills concerts in Greensboro and scraps movie shoots in Asheville and Wilmington.

These Republicans force people into boxes and silence ideas. Their predecessors would never put personal opinion ahead of sustainable prosperity. They understood that a state’s good reputation was hard to win and easy to lose. Sen. Jesse Helms, on his worst day, would not sponsor an anti-LGBT bill that cost North Carolina jobs. He wanted to raise cain in Nicaragua, not Mecklenburg County.

No one studies us now except as a case of dysfunction. It all began when these Republicans obtained a computer and drew districts to elect themselves. Ninety percent of the legislators who voted for HB2 run in the fall either unopposed or without meaningful opposition. These Republicans have chosen their own voters, which is not the way it’s supposed to work.

These Republicans govern in secret and answer to no one – witness the 12-hour passage of HB2. They care nothing for the opinions of the world. This is incredibly sad. How did dangerous fools get power in a good and decent place, where the dogwoods bloom and the cardinals sing? They may be aliens. If North Carolina still had a film industry, we could set up on Jones Street and make “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as a documentary.

We’re an old state, and this is not the first time we’ve been ruled by dangerous fools. The worst bunch were the white supremacists who rose up in the 1890s to smash every good thing about racial progress. After destroying the signs and symbols of black and white people living equally together, they passed the Jim Crow laws to put everybody back into a proper box. The Jim Crow laws have been the gold standard of repression for decades.

These Republicans now aim to set a new gold standard. They have spent three long years keeping citizens from voting, taking money from schoolchildren, denying medical care to the poor, writing bigoted laws and bullying inconvenient professors who tell the truth about them. Oh, yes, and they’ve given a tax cut to people who didn’t need it.

Part of the new Republican creed is humiliation. They must rub their enemies in the dirt. Make no mistake, in passing HB2, they meant to rub the LGBT community in the dirt. But they also meant to rub Charlotte in the dirt. The city is too rich, too tolerant, and its mayor is a Democrat. Over two centuries ago, Lord Cornwallis couldn’t conquer Charlotte. He fled, pronouncing it a hornet’s nest of revolution. Now, Republicans organize Charlotte’s bathrooms. I can see the ghost of Cornwallis riding with them down Trade Street, policing potties. From a bony steed, he menaces citizens without their papers. Ah, Mecklenburg, revenge is sweet!

Wilmington on its knees

Charlotte is a special target, but all cities must feel the lash of these Republicans. Raleigh can’t draw its election lines, and neither can poor Greensboro, which also can’t have a historic district. Asheville can’t manage its water supply. Wilmington must abandon its film industry, which has been tortured in stages until it is finally dead. Apparently nothing enrages these Republicans more than movies.

To see Wilmington once again on its knees must gladden the ghosts of the white supremacists. They remember their triumphs of the 1890s. It was glorious work! Wilmington was to North Carolina then what Charlotte is now: our largest city, prosperous, integrated, with a biracial city council, a black congressman, a lively African-American newspaper and a thriving artisan class. All that had to burn, and burn it did.

Like libertine Charlotte in 2016, wanton Wilmington in 1898 somehow threatened young girls. In 1898 Wilmington, white girls faced danger walking on sidewalks beside black men in business suits. They’d surely be accosted. In Charlotte now, the danger to young girls is transgender women in bathrooms. Somehow it always comes down to sex, the wrong people in dresses, the wrong people in business suits, girls in bathrooms or on sidewalks. When you run out of psychobabble to promote bad politics, start worshiping womanhood. In “The Mind of the South,” W.J. Cash, a son of Charlotte, called this “downright gyneolatry.”

For a long time, nobody has promoted downright gyneolatry with the gusto of these Republicans. They’ve got game, and they’re going for history. Practice before the national media has paid off. Now, after a halting start, when these Republicans give that interview about changing birth certificates before using the potty and making signs on doors to sort by genitalia, they sound every bit as demented as old racists attempting the explain the One-Drop Rule.

Every nightmare ends, and ours will, too. Dawn is breaking, and like zombie kings the Republican leaders rub their eyes, frightened by daylight. They fear in November their computers won’t save them. They fear that unlike Pitchfork Ben, they didn’t disenfranchise enough.

This story was originally published April 17, 2016 at 2:00 PM with the headline "Awake, good North Carolina, from the reign of the zombie kings."