If I told you that the following video was of a guy from Spartanburg dancing around in some bikini briefs, clearly having a good time showing off his body, and strutting around to a club-friendly hip-hop track, your mental Gay-O-Meter alarm might start going off. Well, if you want to be the first to tell Mr. Spartanburg that he’s voguing it up a bit too much for your taste, be my guest.

If anyone was skeptical about the cultural impact of the new Hot Spot Skate Park, they need look no farther than YouTube. There’s usually two or three new videos of skaters showing off each week, and for each video that goes up, a few more people in the skateboarding world become aware of the city and it’s merits. In turn, local skate shops and places that cater to skater culture can actually become part of the engine for economic change in downtown. But, enough of all that stuff. Check out Dylan Church’s mad sk8 skills.

When it comes to needlessly using not work safe language to get across the idea that “I am now going to rap,” the V-Man isn’t someone to be trifled with. He’ll cuss like crazy just to say “Howdy,” I bet. Actual rapping starts at about 45 seconds in, and I’ll let you make up your own mind about his level of talent, lest I become a “hater.”

We’ve covered Triflin’ Friends a few times, a locally produced sitcom that tends to produce mixed reactions as viewing experience. (I find it to be an interesting and exciting media project, if occasionally baffling on a narrative level.) Here we have brief behind-the-scenes interviews with the cast, giving us some insight into the show and some of the personalities involved in making it.

When possible, we like to end each week on a song. Here’s Spartanburg’s own awesome rockers The Antibodies performing “Only It’s You” at a recent gig at HUB-BUB, courtesy of John Watson Video.

As always, if you know of a noteworthy, recently uploaded local video we missed in this week’s roundup, feel free to post a link to it in the comments below. Please add at least a short description so that we know what we’re going to be looking at, and mark it not work safe if there’s content that might not be suitable for viewing, you know, at work.

Are there local blogs you follow daily? Do you follow folks on Twitter that are based in the area and talk about something more than what they ate for lunch? Do you follow any local vloggers? Do you know any locally produced podcasts?

Also, I guess I should clarify one point: By local, I mean “In Spartanburg County, or as near to it as possible if they’re really good and write about locally relevant topics.” If you’re in doubt about how local they are (or at least how local I’d consider them), please feel free to suggest them. They may not be a great fit for the SparkleCityBlogs.com project, but it’s still good to pass the word along to others.

Let’s hear some suggestions!

This week, we’re taking a look at Greer, the mid-way point between Spartanburg and Greenville. As a small township, Greer actually has a lot of things going for it, including at least one decent coffee shop — Cafe Mundo — and a neat-looking little downtown. But what about their local music scene? Is it up to snuff?

There’s only one way to find out.

Stealing Scarlett

2. Christon Owens: There was only one demo version of one song to listen to, and since she wrote it, I’m inclined to be fairly forgiving. “Baby Break My Heart” isn’t a great song, but lyrically speaking it’s certainly no worse than stuff you’d hear on mainstream country radio. Owens doesn’t have a mastery of her voice yet, but I’d definitely be interested in hearing more of her work as she figures out her sound.

3. Grey Water: Oh … um … gosh. What can I say here without sounding really, really mean? The music kind of sounds like a light rock demo track you’d get on a mid-range Casio keyboard from back in the late 1990s. The vocals are … I mean … wow. Well, let’s just say that they appear to be coming from a sincere place. Listen to the first 45 seconds of “Harold’s Song” if you want to know what I’m getting at, and you’ll know all you need to about the band.

4. Monty Craig: Jazz standards with a touch of improv to keep it fresh. Craig is clearly quite talented, and seems utterly comfortable in his chosen genre. It doesn’t do much for me, since I’m generally ambivalent about most lounge-type jazz, and since the intention of the music is often to blur into the background. But in terms of overally quality, there’s a lot to like here, and Craig is obviously quite good at what he does.

5. Maq Sense: I’m not certain how active this group is — the page hasn’t been logged-into since June — but I thought I’d mention it since the music isn’t bad at all. Rapper Ben Huslin clearly has something on his mind with songs like “Lost,” and producer C-Magik can certainly put together a decent track. Definitely worth a listen.

6. Alan B: It’s not every day that you run across a “Christian / Jazz / Neo-soul” act, and I have absolutely no idea what that’s supposed to sound like. Judging by Alan B.’s discography, I’m guessing it means something along the lines of “pointless light jazz noodling for people to ride elevators and wait on hold to.” It’s perfectly proficient on a technical level, but it’s also totally forgettable.

7. Rob Sumwalt: This was a nice little surprise. Sumwalt is a not only a decent singer and guitarist, but he’s also a talented pop songwriter in the style of someone like John Mayer. If you like that style, all of his songs are more than listenable. I recommend starting with “Fly,” which features just Sumwalt and his guitar, and recorded with very little in the way of studio trickery.

Now comes the best part: Where you chime in. Tell me what you think of these performers, or of other acts from the Greer area that I missed.

But after creating the first few sections, I realized that there’s a problem. You see, the only part of Spartanburg I’ve ever lived in is Hampton Heights. I know very little about the neighborhoods in the city, and even less about the surrounding townships in Spartanburg County. As a result, I’m not only uncertain of which neighborhoods to give forums to, but I’m also completely ignorant of what topics are most pressing in those neighborhoods.

What I’m asking for is a little help, and that comes in two parts.

First, I need suggestions as to what neighborhoods and towns need to be added to the forum. I’d prefer these be broad in scope, just to keep the number of subforums manageable, but if need be we can have sub-sub-forums for various areas as well. You can suggest a neighborhood in the comments here, or on the thread I’ve created on the forum itself.

Second, I need some volunteers from within these communities to start some conversations in the forums as they’re created. I’m not talking about moderators or anything, and I’m not asking for a deep commitment. I’m just asking for some people to post a few threads about issues and topics specific to those neighborhoods. And if they could e-mail or Facebook some of their neighbors to maybe tell them that there’s a place to discuss such issues, all the better.

So, do we have any volunteers?

RJ Rockers' Buckwheat After Dark

I feel kinda bad about this review. Or, maybe I should say I feel “BAD.”

Why? Well, because this week I am finally getting around to reviewing a member of a local family of beers that I should have done a long time ago. And, not only that, but the beer I chose to review might only be available at a few more places for just a few more weeks.

The brew is RJ Rockers Buckwheat After Dark, hence the acronym “BAD.” And there is a lot to talk about in regard to this dunkel-style brew that has a lot of complexity, a lot of components and a lot of mystery surrounding it.

Grove is quite fluent when it comes to beer reviewing, and he gives a full examination of the taste and texture of Buckwheat After Dark. Here’s a snippet …

First impressions of the taste are obvious buckwheat flavors. The earthy tones from the aroma translate well to the taste buds and make for a unique flavor of beer. It also contains hints of coffee in the background that don’t make it stout-like, but provide a complexity that lingers momentarily.

It’s a deeply favorable review, and well worth a read to get Grove’s take on the product.

After all, one of you may know of a great local event that’s happening, but which hasn’t quite gotten the P.R. push it deserves. And since the Spark’s calendar system is still temporarily down (see below), we need your suggestions now more than ever.

Of course, it would be totally and completely unfair for me to ask any one of you to start the process off, so I’ll go first.

Thursday: Hanging out with Bob at Bob’s Pretty Good Bookstore, which is rapidly becoming Bob’s Completely Online Bookstore, since that’s where he’s getting most of his business these days. After that, there’s a slim chance I’ll go out, but odds are I’ll watch a movie or something with the wife.

Friday: Lots of work. Freelance work, Spark work, and likely some housework as well. Friday evening, however, I’m planning on braving the crowds to check out the new RJ Rockers’ Tap Room, potentially followed by the Marc Higgins Band and Skye Foundation show at the Hub-Bub.

Saturday: I’m hoping to use at least some of Saturday to reinstall a new calendar system for the Spark, since the old one wasn’t working properly. We’ve long had problems finding just the right program to do what we need, and so I’ll be looking at the available options. No other plans, but I’m hoping something cool happens that evening.

Sunday: Freelance work and stuff. I think there’s a tentative plan to clean the whole house and generally tidy things up. No other plans — maybe the Sunday Songwriters’ Showcase at Sonny’ Brick Oven Pizza — so I’m definitely open to hearing a few suggestions.

See? That wasn’t so hard to do! And my weekend plans aren’t exactly show-stoppers, and I’m sure most of you have plans that will blow mine right out of the water.

So let’s hear them!

And I think it’s wonderful that someone like Spencer has taken the topic on, and actually investigated who would support the idea, who wouldn’t, and what would need to happen to make it work. It’s a rare ideas piece from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal — something they almost never do — and Spencer handles it fairly well. Of course, he doesn’t mention the humble local blog/media outlet that’s been pushing hard for the subject to become part of the discussion, but I’m sure the last thing that chain-owned news outlet wants to do is give a nod to another media outlet. (When we riff on the SH-J’s content, like this very column, we at least have the courtesy to mention the source.)

And while the story itself is quite good in many ways, I actually have a rare criticism of Spencer here. He doesn’t address race, which is the big elephant in the room. Spartanburg is a majority black city, yet the city government has a long history of discouraging participation by the black community on the local level. In fact, this is the reason that we have district elections in Spartanburg, thanks to an NAACP lawsuit that forced the City to end its at-large (and white dominated) elections for City Council seats. And since the city of Spartanburg was very much in the Democrat camp during the 2008 election — and probably has been for almost every election in recent history, given the strong track record of black voters supporting Democratic candiates — it’s hard not to wonder if there’s a connection. After all, the local political dynamic would completely change if black voters — again, the majority population in the city of Spartanburg — turned out in the same numbers for municipal elections as they do for national and state ones.

Yet Spencer doesn’t even mention this. He also doesn’t mention the related issue of economic control, since poor voters (many of which are black) tend not to turn our on off-year elections (work being one major reason), effectively giving the vote to more economically advantaged groups. Sure, anyone can vote, and will if they care enough, but taking advantage of the times when the highest numbers of voters are available simply hasn’t been a priority for the local government. Why is that?

Oddly, Spencer doesn’t address that. The closest he gets to even addressing the overall issue is this …

The S.C. Election Commission has gotten the question before: Why are off-year elections held?

“We’ve found that many say it is the candidates or issues on the ballot — as well as the election — being on its own, by itself, so the candidates don’t get lost in the bigger elections,” Public Relations Director Gary Baum said.

“What we get is a conditioning of the voter … to turn out in November. Many voters enjoy the November of the odd-year election because the candidate issues are more … discussed, and the message is not lost. The candidates are more accessible. And there are few, if any, lines for voters to stand in.”

Even to the untrained eye, this is a rubbish explanation. The real reason has nothing to do with “conditioning,” but rather tradition. It’s been this way for a long time — much longer than the idea of voter conditioning has been — and the idea that the candidates are more accessible is plain bunk, since there’s no reason a local candidate would be any less available on an even-numbered year than an off-numbered one. And Spencer — very out of character — just lets this slide.

That said, ignoring that one glaring flaw, it’s an informative enough story. I’m genuinely excited to see the Spartanburg Herald-Journal taking on this idea — never mind where they got the idea in the first place — and the shift in tone to more proactive approach to local government coverage is very welcome indeed. Here’s hoping that they keep it up, and that their coverage only gets better.

H1N1

The Spartanburg County Health Department will hold a free walk-in H1N1 clinic for the general public on Wednesday, November 11, Saturday, November 21, Saturday, December 5, Saturday, December 12, and Saturday, December 19. This shot if free to the general public and administered between 8:30 a.m. and 4:00 pm on these days. The CDC recommended groups receive the H1N1 vaccine include:

• All children from 6 months to 17 years old.
• Household contact and caregivers for babies younger than 6 months of age.
• Pregnant women.
• Young adults 18 to 24 years of age.
• People 25 through 64 years of age who have health conditions that put them at higher risk of medical complications from flu.

Let’s work together to keep ourselves and our children healthy through winter season!

Good education requires more than books and seasonal fruit, it requires Big Ideas.

Of course, not having kids and not really knowing much about local school board policies, I’m going to need a little help with this week’s Big Idea. You see, even though I’ve read up on some of the issues (specifically things like transparency), I’m not anywhere near as informed as even a moderately involved parent or teacher is. As a result, I really can’t offer much to the discussion other than ideological platitudes.

But you can.

So, let’s identify the biggest issues facing local schools and then come up with some ways the local district boards can address them in a meaningful, concrete way.

From following the election, here are some of the bigger issues, which should at least serve as a starting point for the discussion.

• Transparency: A lot of people got rightly worked up about how District 7’s badly conceived, seemingly secretive County Club of Spartanburg deal turned into a total fiasco, but the problem of transparency goes far beyond that. How can this issue be meaningfully addressed?
• Financial Responsibility: These are tough times for everyone, and for local schools things aren’t getting any easier thanks to the Libertarian-leaning agenda of Gov. Sanford and various agents of anti-public school movement backer Howard Rich. (An aside: Using shell companies, Rich gave an estimated $40,000 just to Joey Millwood’s campaign in 2008, and similar donations to Lee Bright.) So, how can local school districts do more with less money?
• Inequality With Districts: Not all local schools are equally supported, even within the same districts, and that often brings up the uncomfortable subject of economic class and racial disparities. How can these concerns be addressed?

Obviously, this is just scratching the surface of the topic, but at least it’s a place to get the conversation moving.

Since this is a heated topic, I’ll once again remind you of the basic rules of the Big Idea column: This is a brainstorm, and there are no stupid ideas. Even the most impractical ideas can be useful as springboards to more realistic ones. Also, let’s all try to keep an open mind here, and not let political ideologies get in the way of discussion. We’re talking about real, concrete changes in actual policy, not what “should” be in an ideal world.

OK, let’s hear those ideas!

Not news.

But when I saw the headline “Chocolate Milk Under Attack! Should it Be Banned From School Cafeterias?” I simply had to find out what the deal was. I was actually a little concerned that PETA had gotten to someone at WSPA, but it turns out it was just Pet Milk and the Got Milk campaign doing everything they can to keep customers by talking up chocolate milk as an alternative to sugary drinks.

Here, take a look at this …

My gripe here is pretty basic: This is not news. It’s basically WSPA riffing on the recent USA Today story, itself pretty much non-news, which reported that some people think chocolate milk has too much sugar to be included in school menus.

While I do appreciate the fact that WSPA is trying to take a national story and bring it to a local level — I applaud that — they completely missed the real battle that’s happening here. Instead of asking what kids think about chocolate milk, they could have reported on the clandestine little trade war that is being fought over the access to student meals.

You see, the dairy industry makes a lot of money selling their products to schools. And since there are only a limited number of things that more-or-less everyone agrees are OK for kids to be drinking in the first place, and also a limited amount of space for options in most school cafeterias, the milk-sellers are desperate to make sure that as many of their products stay on the shelves as possible.

The battle isn’t really about whether or not chocolate milk is to too sugary — at that serving size, the caloric difference between chocolate and white milk is basically negligible — and it’s also only tangentially about whether or not milk in general is a good thing to have on the menu. Rather, this whole controversy is because other segments of the beverage industry want a bigger piece of the action. And since milk has been the dominant beverage in school cafeterias for 60-plus years, having a virtual monopoly for much of that time, they’re not exactly going to give it up without a fight. We’re talking about lucrative government contracts on a massive scale here.

And what WPSA doesn’t bother to mention is that this is why Pet Milk hosted the event at Beck Academy in Greenville in the first place. It was PR, plain and simple. It’s not about health, it’s about market share. And WSPA doesn’t even give a nod to this in their story, instead settling for not-even-two-minute non-story about whether or not chocolate milk has too many calories, and whether or not white milk tastes too nasty for kids to drink.

As a result, no one was really informed of anything here, and what little information we do get comes more-or-less from the milk industry’s talking points list. We hear that “some educators and obesity experts [think that] kids get too much sugar,” but we’re not really told who they are or what the context is. (The USA Today story cited Marlene Schwartz, deputy directory of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, as being one of the more high-profile critics of chocolate milk.) Instead, WSPA — and their viewers — just kind of get sucked into the dairy industry’s party line.

Instead of investigative journalism and a questioning of why this controversy is happening, whether or not school officials are aware of the bigger issues at hand, or giving the non-milk advocates (some of whom do have legitimate concerns about dairy products playing such a huge role in school menus in general) a chance to present their side of the story, we have a shallow, forgettable, non-researched story that’s doesn’t tell us anything other than some kids prefer chocolate milk and a school nurse doesn’t see what the fuss is about.

That’s not news; it’s filler.

Sure, it’s a harmless enough story. It’s not even two minutes long, and it just kind of ends with a conclusionless shrug at the end, but it also doesn’t really give you any kind of meaningful information. In case you were wondering, this is exactly why I stopped watching TV news years ago.

WSPA is perfectly capable of doing decent news stories when they want to, and it’s saddening to think of the missed opportunities here. The could have talked about how trade groups are battling with questionable science to get exclusive access to kids diets, and how the decision-making process at the administrative level is being influenced by money at least as much as it is the best interests of the students.

But we don’t get that. Instead, we learn that “Byrnes High School student Brittany Reese isn’t a big fan milk.” That’s not really useful information to me, and it doesn’t give anyone a clue what to do if they want to influence the debate. It’s filler, and a missed opportunity.

Gary Glancy over at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal has the story …

After weeks of waiting, the Tap Room at RJ Rockers at the corner of West Main Street and Daniel Morgan Avenue is about to open.

Although separately owned and operated from the RJ Rockers Brewing Co. next door in the former Salvation Army building, the Tap Room will essentially be an extension of the brewery, which has been making beer in its new downtown digs since August.

So, what will the place be like? When it comes to covering beer, Glancy delivers.

[The Tap Room] will start out with 34 taps — including all 11 of Rockers’ current offerings, from the last kegs of the spring/summer seasonal, Son of a Peach Wheat Ale, to the just-released winter seasonal, First Snow Ale. A limited wine list also will be offered.

The 2,400-square-foot space that once housed the Salvation Army thrift store has been transformed to include a 40-foot bar, eight flat-screen TVs for sports fans, video games and a music stage.

Just like the old Rockers brewpub, the Tap Room will host a trivia night on Saturdays, plus karaoke Thursdays and Fridays and musical performances down the road. The establishment will also be smoke-free inside, with wraparound sidewalk seating outside.

While this is great news for local beer lovers, the economic impact of the opening on downtown in general will almost certainly be profound. Tons of people coming downtown to drink local beer — and later to visit the adjacent Main Street Pub — will certainly mean more money going into the local economy. But it’ll also mean more people downtown in general, which means more foot traffic for local eateries and more motivation for retailers to consider a move to the downtown area in general.

And when combined with the 2000-ish people (and that’s a low-end guess) that will be taking working or taking classes at the new USC-Upstate business college and the coming Spartanburg Community College campus (many of which will be wanting a beer after class/work I’d imagine), the impact only become more significant.

So, is this opening the first signs of a real economic recovery in downtown Spartanburg? Are you skeptical about it, having been burned in the past by other downtown revitalization initiatives? Superstitious about it, and not wanting to jinx it by getting all excited? Or are you just happy something — anything — is finally happening downtown?

Just to remind you of the situation, it basically involves a bunch of bickering over which group gets to control the agenda for the delegation, which Spartanburg area at the state level. There are two camps: The majority of the delegation, who elected Rep. Lanny Littlejohn (R-Pacolet) chairman and 8-5 to elect Rep. Keith Kelly (R-Woodruff) as vice chairman. But, that didn’t sit well with Lee Bright, Sens. Shane Martin and Glenn Reese and Rep. Joey Millwood, and they decided to start their own delegation based on the idea that their districts have a higher population, therefore their votes should have more weight. So those four decided to hold their own meeting — completely excluding the rest of the delegation — and elected themselves as the representatives of the area.

Of course, there was no reason to think this was binding, or even legal, particularly since it was dubious at best that the four meeting could constitute a quorum, never mind the legitimacy of all of the stuff they voted at the meeting. As you might expect, the case went to court.

As Bob Dalton from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal reports today, the South Carolina Supreme Court completely and definitively rejected the claim made by Bright and company.

In Monday’s unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice Jean Toal, the high court sided with Mitchell’s contention that delegation officers are ceremonial positions and are not subject to weighted voting rules.

“Furthermore, the Chairman and Vice-Chairman: (a) cannot take any action on behalf of the delegation save for calling a meeting to order and certain other procedural matters, (b) cannot independently exercise any of the substantive functions of the delegation except by virtue of their roles as voting members, and (c) are not accorded greater weight when voting by virtue of their positions as delegation officers,” Toal wrote. “Thus, these officers do not perform substantive duties and perform no governmental functions that raise the concerns at issue in Vander Linden [Vander Linden v. Hodges is the case both sides cited as precedent -- SS]. Therefore, Vander Linden’s weighted voting remedy does not apply to the election of Chairman and Vice-Chairman, and these offices can be elected by a simple majority vote of the delegation.”

Bright said in an e-mailed statement he was “disappointed although not surprised,” and called the opinion “flawed.”

The court couldn’t have been more clear that Bright’s gang was completely, totally and unquestionably in the wrong. Which means that we can now call this what it was: A power grab. I hope voters remember exactly how much time Bright, Reese, Martin and Millwood wasted, and how they attempted to wrongly take control of the delegation based on an argument that even state Attorney General Henry McMaster dismissed as being fundamentally flawed.

As an aside, it’s in this kind of story that Dalton’s reporting style really shines, and the story is well worth the read.

This past Halloween, my granddaughter Helene’ was dressed up in an adorable bunny costume and was taken around the neighborhood so she could trick or treat. She quickly learned that saying “Twick or Tweet” was part of the ritual along with “Thank You.” but not necessarily in that order. She was taken to a total of three houses before her mother pleaded exhaustion, and they spent the rest of the evening handing out candy. I don’t really blame her. Toddlers in oversized bunny costumes, hyped up on skittles, and who have said “twick or tweet” 128 times in the time it took to walk up a single sidewalk would exhaust anyone much less a mommy expecting child number two.

They tried to get Helene’ to help give candy to the children who passed through. Helene’ would pick up a piece of candy, look at the kid, then the candy then would either put the candy back in the bowl or just hold on to the piece. It was like she knew that she had a piece of yummy candy and was wondering why everyone wanted to give it away instead of letting her eat it herself.

Being a toddler, one of her favorite words after “no” is “mine”. She was upset just last night because my cat Chernobyll got a whiff of Helene’s little slice of pizza and was trying to sneak a bit of cheesy goodness. Chernobyll was trying to be subtle in her pizza stalking and failing miserably at it. Helene’ was trying to move away from the persistent pizza loving feline who was just wanting to share. The cat knew quite well that Helene’ has often willingly been the source of an otherwise forbidden snack. Both my cat and my granddaughter are very gentle, non-violent souls, so it took removing the cat from the room to resolve the situation.

In her little world, everything belongs to her, even if she does call it Meymey’s blanket, Nana’s toothbrush, Pappy’s shoes or Mommy’s purse. She sincerely expects you to share with her, especially when you have something to eat. Your lap is her lap, and she doesn’t like sharing it with anyone, especially the cats. Your television is her television as that is where all princesses can be seen yearning for their prince. Your bed is her nap spot, or if she catches you at a weak moment her above ground trampoline.

Yet the same child that goes “Mine! Mine! Mine!” when another child wants her stuffed pig, is the same one that will freely share with you or others something no questions asked. Toddlers especially are great at sharing. In fact, they expect you to want to share with them. They want you to play with them, to share their cookie with you, no matter how mushy it has gotten, and will gladly allow you to help her read a book. They will hand you a toy so you can play with them, or hand you their sippy cup so you can taste her their juice. As they get a bit older, they will share their lunches at school, seats on the bus, and will allow other children to use an extra pencil when the lead breaks.

As they reach the teenaged years our children will willingly trade clothes, shoes, toys, cd’s, lunches and games using a simple barter system that entails one simple rule. “I will let you have this for awhile, if you can let me have this for awhile.” Time limits are often forgotten as is just who is the original owner. The only downside to this simple barter system is that sometimes Mom or Dad’s things get included without our realization, or until we see your child’s friend wearing the blouse you thought you’d lost three months ago.

One of the great things about kids and sharing is that they don’t really expect anything in return for their being generous with another. They don’t keep score as to which of them is being the most giving when it comes to sharing, except when it comes to sharing chores or who is getting the bigger portion of ice cream. Even then they don’t maintain a list of just how things were doled out to whom and in who’s favor. Unless they were my kids, but their score keeping was pretty lousy, and they knew it.

Whining about chores or ice cream portions doesn’t compare to watching your kids on a rainy afternoon with a box of beaten up crayons and a single coloring book, peacefully creating art while passing each other the orange when the one is done with it. At that moment they don’t care who is using that crayon more then the other or even if one of them gets done with their page first. The other patiently waits, and even helps finish filling in the blank spaces. Once the sun comes back out and they can go outside, they run to the swing set and take turns going down the still wet slide to the waiting muddy puddle at the bottom. Getting dirty is the goal, it doesn’t even matter who goes first.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if we adults could share like that?

It’s probably not as uncommon as I’d like to think it is to read a book and feel that at certain points the book is referring to you directly, and it’s probably even less uncommon to have that happen while reading a nonfiction book specifically about your hometown. So when I say that reading Marko Maunula’s book Guten Tag Y’all: Globalization and the South Carolina Piedmont was, at certain turns, a deeply personal experience, it’s not nearly as remarkable as it sounds. Even so, Maunula’s book—part labor history and part economic case study—definitely made an impression.

Maunula will be speaking at the downtown library tomorrow night and though his book’s title would lead you to believe that it’s about globalization in the Upstate, it actually centers its focus almost entirely around Spartanburg County.

The book deals largely with Spartanburg as a center of foreign investment, examining why Spartanburg had such a large growth in investment, particularly from European countries, during the period mentioned in the title. What interested me most though, was that in the process of describing how this investment came to Spartanburg, Maunula goes a long way in explaining why those businesses were attracted here in the first place, albeit with a cool sense of academic detachment.

The biggest reason, as Maunula points out in numerous places throughout the book is that “Spartanburg’s workers were relatively skilled, not prone to unionization, and inexpensive.”

That fact, coupled with an aggressive sales campaign and a business community organized around the idea of paternalistic control over “their” workers as well as the business environment at large, seems to be what drove the supposed Spartanburg economic juggernaut that so many Reganites and economic libertarians wrote about back in the 80’s.

Maunula calls what happened here a “classic revolution from above”, and though he doesn’t say as much, the rest of his book goes a long way towards pointing out that it was a revolution not just from above, but for those above as well. Maunula writes extensively about the fascinating role prominent figures like Roger Milliken and former Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce Director Dick Tukey played in luring businesses into the area, but he also gives equal weight to industry groups like the Spartanburg Development Association whose anti-union actions are absolutely legendary among locals.

Speaking as the child of a factory worker who grew up in Spartanburg in the 80’s, if there was an economic juggernaut here we sure as hell didn’t know about it.

Reading Maunula’s take on the SDA reminded me of when I was a kid, and how my Papa told me that all the bosses in Spartanburg had a group where they decided what everybody was going to be paid, and worked together to blackball anybody who “made trouble” in their workplaces. I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out later that the group Papa was talking about was the SDA. As I got older I started to appreciate the irony of a group of industrialists organizing together primarily to prevent their employees from doing the same.

Because of the work of Spartanburg’s elite to tightly control all aspects of the area’s industrial culture, wages in the area remained much lower than the national average, even up till today. Perhaps most cynically of all, those elites who held control over Spartanburg’s workers with an iron fist, were always the first to talk about the importance of community. I often wonder if anybody ever thought to ask any of those elites why they felt it was important for the health of the community that the working people of Spartanburg unquestioningly accept their benevolent paternalism rather than seize a seat at the economic table for themselves.

Regardless of what that answer would be, the fact remains that Spartanburg, for the better part of it’s existence, has organized itself around a sort of business feudalism, a closed society where even certain businesses that don’t meet with the approval of the group are not allowed in.

One of Maunula’s more stunning finds in the book is a quote from an official with the SDA on why the group had worked to prevent a unionized Mazda plant from coming to the county: “It is our considered view that the Mazda plant would have a long-term chilling effect on Spartanburg’s orderly industrial growth. An auto plant, employing over 3,000 card-carrying, hymn-singing members of the UAW would, in our opinion, bring to an abrupt halt future desirable industrial growth.”

Hard to imagine it stated more clearly than that. The SDA and other groups like them are all for the free market, as long as they get to pick who’s in the market and how much they pay their employees.

In all honesty, there’s not a ton of new information on Spartanburg’s industrial culture in Guten Tag Y’all for anybody whose ear has been on the ground locally for a while, but what is there is confirmation. What came to me throughout my life mostly as conjecture, rumor and personal experience now sits here in black and white, thoroughly researched and footnoted. As I absorbed that fact, another question occurred to me: what happens now?

It’s pretty easy to see that foreign industrial investment in Spartanburg has seen its apex come and go, and while many of our leaders seem to be waiting for the next BMW to swoop in and save us, the policy of selling our cheap, docile labor force to the world isn’t going to gain new traction anytime soon. In our globalized society, labor flows to the lowest cost regions in the world as surely as water from Lawson’s Fork flows to the Atlantic.

Spartanburg’s labor is cheap compared with other places in the United States, but not compared with the slave-wages companies can get away with paying in the Far East and the developing world.

So as they so often do these days, my thoughts wander to Spartanburg’s blue-collar workers. What happens to them as this house of cards built on a corrupt bargain crumbles? What will happen to those people who tossed their lot with the industrialists, and now are watching as their hopes for an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work disappear? Nobody I’ve asked seems to know.

There’s talk of a post-industrial creative-class driven future for Spartanburg, and that seems just fine except that there’s not much a 20-year veteran of the manufacturing sector can expect to gain from that idea. Education is the key for the next generation, but even then, after presumably all the turmoil has passed, the setup is there for a teeming underclass resigned to serving coffee to the creatives and taking out their garbage.

I don’t have an answer to the question of what comes next for the mass of people who have had the industrialists’ promise of economic stability broken. As the manufacturing sector continues to decline, I don’t know what will ultimately happen to them after this globalization revolution has taken its course, but I intend to keep asking the question.

I intend to ask it tomorrow night, when I go see Mr. Maunula speak. As I walk up the steps of our downtown library—a building designed partly as an homage to the old brick textile mills—my mind will surely be swimming in a sea of questions without any real answers.

Are the crumbling mill villages that dot Spartanburg County a harbinger of what’s to come for our modern working class? I hope against hope that it won’t turn out that way, that I’m wrong about our modern manufacturing plants going the way of the old mills. Those jobs, even though they don’t pay nearly what they should or would in other parts of the country, are better than the nothing that looks poised to replace them.

Since we’re on the topic of high school activities, here’s the Spartanburg High School cheerleading team showing that they’re no slouches, either.

Now for a different kind of cheerleading: Political cheerleading. Here’s a short video profile of Spartanburg’s own chapter of the progressive/liberal discussion group, Drinking Liberally. If you’ve never been to one of the meetings, they’re actually a lot of fun. That is, if you like drinking beer and talking politics, of course.

And since we always like to end on a song, here’s local band the Antibodies — with The Pulse dancers — performing the song “Needs Me.” Yee-haw!

As always, if you know of a cool, locally relevant video we missed, leave a short description and a link to the video in the comments below. Also, if there’s something controversial or naughty in the vid that could get someone in trouble for watching it at work, please include the statement Not Work Safe in the description.