Being a True and Faithful Account of Men Who Mistake the Shimmer of Their Own Ambition for the Light of Public Service

Now understand something about the Alabama State Legislature — and understand it the way you understand why a possum plays dead, which is to say, not because it’s smart, but because something in the ancient lizard-brain of the universe decided that stillness was survival, and survival was enough, and enough was everything, and everything was, ultimately, the possum lying in a ditch on Highway 280 between Hoover and Pelham, grinning its pink-gummed grin at the indifferent stars.

The men who run Alabama — and they are, with the precision of an antebellum portrait, almost entirely men, the kind of men who own at least one belt buckle that cost more than your car payment — these men have elevated the doing of nothing to something approaching high art. Not the good kind of art. Not the kind that unsettles you at three in the morning and makes you reconsider the architecture of your regrets. The other kind. The kind that hangs in the lobby of a Cullman insurance agency and depicts a covered bridge in autumn, rendered in oils by a man who’d never experienced doubt.

These are the bridge painters of governance. And God love them, they are busy.

You have to understand the horse trading. You have to understand it the way you understand humidity in August, which is totally and with your whole body, against your will, forever. The horse trading begins before the session starts and does not end when the session ends, because the session ending is itself a kind of horse trade, a negotiation about when to stop pretending to negotiate, which requires its own set of negotiations, which require bourbon, which require a particular kind of Decatur county bourbon that comes in a bottle shaped like the state of Alabama and costs thirty-two dollars and is given as a gift by a lobbyist for a payday loan company whose clients are largely the constituents these men were elected to serve.

The horses, you should know, are not real horses. There are no horses. This is important. The horses are metaphors, but they are metaphors that have been traded so many times, across so many smoky rooms in Montgomery, that they have become more real than real horses, which is the great trick of the Alabama Republican caucus — they have made the abstraction of power more tangible than the concrete reality of the people they govern, and they have done this without breaking a sweat, which in Alabama is genuinely miraculous.

A man named Brock — there is always a man named Brock, and if there is no Brock there is a Trent, and if there is no Trent there is a Chip whose legal name is Charles but nobody has called him Charles since his grandmother died in 2003 — this man named Brock sits in a leather chair that cost the state of Alabama four hundred and twelve dollars and he is, at this moment, trading a vote on a drainage ditch appropriations bill in Hale County for a promise that the committee chairmanship of the Committee on Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry will pass to his second cousin, who once shook hands with Bob Riley and has never recovered from the electricity of it.

The drainage ditch will not be dug.

The chairmanship will be promised and then re-promised and then the promise itself will become a chip in a different game, like a Russian nesting doll of betrayal, each hollow wooden figure containing a smaller hollow wooden figure, until you get to the tiniest one, the one at the very center, and you open it and inside is a note that reads: re-elect Brock.

Here is what they have done for their constituents lately, rendered as a partial and charitable list:

They have issued a resolution honoring the Gadsden High School football team.

They have prayed.

They have issued another resolution, this one honoring a 102-year-old woman named Eunice from Talladega who grew her own tomatoes and whose longevity they attributed, in the resolution itself, to “faith, family, and the good Lord’s mercy,” which is beautiful and true and does not, in any technical sense, constitute legislation.

They have been photographed at the ribbon-cutting of a Dollar General in a county where the nearest hospital closed in 2019.

They have prayed again, with more feeling this time.

They have raised their own per diem.

The thing about Alabama Republicans — and here is where we must pause to appreciate the genuine, almost beatific, genius of their position — is that they have solved the central problem of politics, which is the gap between what you promise and what you deliver, by the elegant method of never promising anything specific enough to be disproven.

They are for Alabama. Who could argue? They are for jobs. They are for faith. They are for the Second Amendment, which doesn’t need their help but appreciates the shoutout. They are against things from Washington, which is far enough away to remain usefully vague and close enough to fly to on a Tuesday for a conference sponsored by a foundation whose funding comes from people who make things that are bad for you in ways that will take another decade to fully document.

They have, collectively, the political philosophy of a golden retriever — boundless enthusiasm, total loyalty to whoever is currently holding the treat, and a complete inability to explain what they plan to do about the Black Belt’s infant mortality rate, which is, in certain counties, comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is a fact so large and so shameful that the only rational response is to build a fence around it in your mind and plant crepe myrtles along the fence and take a picture of the crepe myrtles for your campaign mailer.

There is a committee. There are, in fact, seventeen committees. The committees meet and the committees talk and the committees table and the committees adjourn and the committees reconvene and a bill that would fund school nurses in rural counties — school nurses, the kind of person who hands a child an ice pack and calls their mother, the single most uncontroversial use of public money imaginable — this bill is referred to committee in February and it is studied in committee in March and it is amended in committee in April and the amendment is debated and the debate is tabled and the tabling is debated and somewhere in a school in Perry County a child is describing, as best she can, the way her chest feels when she runs, and there is no nurse to hear her, and the committee is very busy, and the horses need trading.

The lobbyists move through the Capitol like warm weather moves through a screen door — inevitable, invisible, invited. A man who represents the interests of the for-profit prison industry has lunch with a man who votes on prison policy and they eat chicken piccata at a place that doesn’t technically require a reservation but where you will always get a table if Brock makes a call, and they talk about their children’s Little League teams and the Auburn-Alabama game and the bill dies in committee, which was, if we are being honest with ourselves, the point of the chicken piccata all along.

What kills you — what really opens you up like a letter from the IRS delivered on Christmas morning — is the sincerity.

These men are, in their own mineral-dense hearts, sincere. They believe in the work. They believe they are doing it. They drive their F-250s through the scrubby pines and the red clay and the towns with the Dollar Generals and the closed ERs and the payday loan storefronts that bloom in the ruins of former furniture stores, and they see all of this and they feel, welling up inside them like a slow sunrise over the Coosa River, a profound and genuine love for the place. They are of it. They smell like it. Their vowels were made by it. Their grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers’ bones are in its soil.

And then they go back to Montgomery and they do nothing, with great ceremony and evident passion, for another year.

The thing about doing nothing, if you do it long enough and with enough conviction, is that it starts to look like something. It develops texture. Committees. Resolutions. Prayer. Ribbon-cuttings. Press releases about federal money that arrived because of a grant written by a career civil servant in a cubicle in Birmingham who will never be in the press release. The nothing accumulates and accretes and eventually you can point to the pile of it and say: look what we have built. And the pile is real, in its way — real as a covered bridge in autumn, real as a belt buckle, real as a possum on Highway 280, grinning its immortal grin at the indifferent and spectacular stars.

The drainage ditch remains undug.

Eunice’s tomatoes are coming up beautifully.

Brock is running unopposed.

And the Lord looked down upon the great state of Alabama and saw that it was full of potential, and full of beauty, and full of men in leather chairs trading invisible horses, and He sighed the kind of sigh that rattles windows three counties over, and He went back to watching the Braves game, because even He has his limits.