Waldo Lydecker's Journal.: -like they'll give up the Terry Jones stakeout, too

But it’s not just Fox News and conservative talk radio paying so much attention to Greene; it’s liberal media outlets like The Huffington Post and MSNBC, too. And, while it would be nice to believe that the continuing fascination with Greene is a right-wing conspiracy to hurt Democrats, I think it’s something worse. At this point, any journalist covering Greene is basically mocking him. In one respect, that makes him no different from the handful of other fringe candidates who, for whatever reason, capture the fancy of the mainstream media, whether it’s Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton on the left orRick Barber and Dale Peterson on the right. But when reporters mock these fringe politicians, they are, to a large extent, mocking their ideologies—and the cultural baggage that comes with those ideologies.

Alvin Greene doesn’t represent any ideology, at least not a recognizable one. But he does represent a culture—namely the culture of the working-class (and often rural) black South. Granted, I make that claim with some trepidation; I don’t want to suggest that obscenity indictments and involuntary military discharges are representative of any particular culture. But if you’ve spent any time in the Pee Dee in South Carolina or theBlack Belt in Alabama, then Greene probably reminds you of some of the people you’ve met there. His slow, occasionally halting pattern of speech—which once led a CNN interviewer to ask him if he was mentally impaired or drunk. His tumbledown home—which, as every profile of him almost invariably marvels, does not have a computer. His“family reunion” t-shirt. These aren’t unusual things in parts of this country, but these are the things that people mock when they mock Greene. For reasons that have more to do with class than race, being poor and black and demonstrating a remarkable unfamiliarity with the ironic sensibility that holds sway among denizens of coastal cities is still considered acceptable to laugh at. Because, let’s face it, laughing at white rednecks has become passé. (Laughing with them is another matter: see Larry the Cable Guy.) Laughing at black backwoods types, however, still seems relatively fresh. As The Awlrecently pointed out, a lot of the popular Internet memes these days are “mostly just people laughing at working-class African-Americans”; what’s more, if you look at the five videos the Awl highlights, four have Southern datelines.

And that’s why reporters really need to stop covering Greene—not only because it does him no favors at this point (“Nobody should have to be a laughingstock,” as one South Carolina voter recently put it to the Charlotte Observer), but also because their coverage of Greene reveals their own prejudices. This was most apparent during that WBT interview. After Greene got up to dance, Larson, the show’s host who’d uproariously introduced his guest as “the unemployed, enigmatic, true American hero,” expressed his displeasure with Greene’s moves. “You’re biting your lower lip there, Alvin! You’re looking like a white guy in a wedding, biting your lower lip there,” Larson admonished the candidate. “Knock that off! You can’t do that!” To which I really wish Greene had replied, “Why the hell not?”