Buckhead City - Part Four

It's my opinion/prediction that sooner or later Buckhead will eventually secede from the City of Atlanta.  As I've said before, Buckhead has always had its own unique identity and demographics.  The idea of secession has been brought up many times, almost to the point of it being a reflexive reaction to any political disagreement.  In other words, talk about it long enough, and sooner or later it will happen.  Spend enough time in a barber shop, you're eventually going to get a haircut.

But please, not now, and most especially not under the leadership behind the current effort.  

Let's take a closer look.  The current secession movement is led by a group calling itself the Buckhead City Committee.  According to their web site, the Committee is led by three individuals (all white males) -  Bill White (Chairman and CEO), Sam Lenaeus (President), and Christian Zimm (VP - Communications and Social Media). 

Sam Lanaeus is a Buckhead realtor.  Christian Zimm is a realtor, too, and if you click the Instagram icon on the BCC website beneath Zimm's picture, the first thing you encounter is a photo of him wrapped in an American flag, wearing it like some sort of prayer shawl. Nothing against patriotism, but that kind of over-the-top display of flag fetishism is usually a warning sign of Tea Party neo-conservatism (anyone remember the time Trump hugged and groped an American flag at a rally?).  A few pictures below that, Zimm is giving a thumb's up sign in front of a Buckhead Young Republicans banner.  Okay, so his political orientation is clear enough.

But the public face and voice of the BCC is Bill White. An ardent Trump supporter, he has thrown $5 million fundraisers for Trump and is quick to make it known that he has the cellphone numbers of Trump's sons on speed dial.  According to the New York Times, he has poured more than $50,000 of his own money into supporting the disgraced, twice-impeached, former president, who smiles in photos on the bookshelves of his home. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described him by saying, "If Donald Trump had a smoother, better dressed, gay younger brother, it could be Bill White."  

According to the Washington Examiner, White is the former president of the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in Manhattan, credited with bringing it back from the brink of financial ruin.  Prior to Trump's election, White and his husband enjoyed life in the liberal enclaves of Manhattan and the Hamptons, where they flipped homes as a hobby.  Longtime backers of liberal elite causes and ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton, they hosted Barack Obama as the guest of honor at a $39,500-a-plate truffle risotto dinner in their Chelsea townhouse.  Aretha Franklin was the singer at the couple's wedding.  Former New York Governor David Paterson, Barbara Walters, Gayle King, music mogul Clive Davis, and Victoria's Secret model Karolina Kurkova were also among the guests.

Social psychologist Johnathan Haidt uses the image of a monkey riding an elephant to describe how our subconscious desires dictate our actions.  In his analogy, the monkey thinks it's driving the elephant, directing it where to go, but in reality the elephant goes wherever it wants and the monkey is just hanging on for the ride.  Similarly, our subconscious elephant makes most of our decisions for us and does whatever it likes, while our rational monkey mind tries to make up justifications and reasons to explain the elephant's behavior.  The rational monkey mind thinks it's in control, directing the elephant's behavior with logic and rational thought, but in reality the elephant does whatever it damn well pleases, and forces the monkey to come up with reasons to justify that behavior.

Bill White's conversion from the Manhattan Democratic elite to an ardent Trump supporter clearly shows the motivations of his subconscious elephant.  White's reversal can specifically be pinpointed to about midnight on Nov. 8, 2016, when he and his husband were watching the election-night returns at Hillary's headquarters inside the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.  Unhappy with the increasingly funereal atmosphere there, they reportedly hopped into their Chevy Suburban and drove across town to the New York Hilton in Midtown, where Trump was celebrating his victory.

“I didn’t want to be part of that misery pie," White said, according to the Times. "I’m not a wallower in self-pity.” That the couple can be "so morally vacuous as to simply decide they wanted to go with the winner — whoever that may be — and race to the other side of Manhattan to join him at his victory party is almost as jarring as the fact that these men aren't at all embarrassed to reveal this shallow opportunism to the world," wrote Huffington Post columnist Michelangelo Signorile in a scathing piece about the couple in 2018. 

Their subconscious elephant was repelled by the Debbie-Downer pessimism of the Clinton event and drawn to the jubilant atmosphere of Trump's.  The rational monkey mind then had to make up excuses and justifications to support the elephant's subconscious decision, so now they reject claims that Trump holds racist views by citing improved black employment numbers, Trump's own talking point.  They deny that Trump has advanced an anti-gay agenda by citing his appointment of Richard Grenell, an openly gay man, as ambassador to Germany.  Trump’s lies and falsehoods? “Exaggerations,” White says. “He’s the marketer in chief for the United States. So what?”

The enormity of the ego of White's subconscious elephant is reflected in his contempt for Chelsea Clinton.  He complains that he had to “call through five people” to reach her on the phone when he was a Clinton supporter, while, as a Trump supporter, Donald Trump Jr. allegedly “picks up on the first ring” when he calls.  He is angry that at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, he was unable to get access to Hillary Clinton for a meet-and-greet.  Trump, on the other hand, has welcomed the couple to Mar-a-Lago and posed with them in photos they use in their Twitter backgrounds. Now that he's the CEO of the Buckhead City Committee, he complains that "We haven't heard from the janitor, let alone the mayor, let alone the City Council president, let alone the people running for office."   

"Nobody has reached out to me, nobody has reached out to our group. We are all over the internet, and no one has said, 'Hey, I work for the city. My name is Keisha Bottoms, and we'd love to talk to you.' They don't give a damn about Buckhead. They only give a damn about our money, but this is the end of the road for them. The piggy bank is over for them." Of course, he didn't explain why he felt it was incumbent on them, the elected, established leaders of a major American city, to reach out to him, a newcomer promoting a subversive agenda, and not the other way around. 

So all that it took to convert White's ideology and political beliefs from one end of the spectrum to the other was the prospect of enduring a depressing party when there was a far more fabulous event going on across town, and his grievance that one side seemed to show him less fealty than the other. Obviously, those are not rational reasons to switch allegiances, but they are the gut-level subconscious reactions of the elephant.  The monkey mind then makes up rationalizations, like African-American employment statistics and the perceived depths of the Mayor's concern about Buckhead, to justify the seemingly capricious changeover.

It should also be noted that subconscious elephants are pack animals and tend to follow other elephants.  Their conversion occurred together as a couple, so the decision of each of their subconscious elephants was reinforced by the behavior of the other.  "Switching allegiances on election night isn't such a banana-pants decision; look, they're doing it, too." 

Since their conversion, the couple have made a gradual shift from life in the Hamptons and Manhattan to Buckhead, Georgia.  However, before leaving the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum, White agreed to pay a $1 million settlement to end an investigation into his role in a pay-to-play scandal. He was never charged with a crime and has said he did nothing wrong.  White told the Washington Examiner that he "decided against my better judgment to settle it as it was a political item, not because of anything else."

White is now taking the case for Buckhead secession to right-wing media.  He has regularly appeared on Carlson Tucker's show and other Fox News outlets, and the movement has been covered by the far-right OAN Network.  If you're a regular watcher of Fox News, you probably already recognize his face, although I for one have never seen him on MSNBC.

So as I wrote yesterday, there are many reasons to believe that Buckhead secession is a bad idea and  that it won't solve the major issue, crime, driving its popular support right now.  But I also worry about a movement whose leadership is dominated by right-wing realtors, helmed by a narcissist power-broker of questionable ethics (e.g., the scandal settlement) who formerly flipped high-end real estate as "a hobby." I worry that the Buckhead City Committee is more interested in carving up their new city among developers and speculators, flipping properties and earning themselves million-dollar commissions, than they are about creating a sustainable and livable community.  I don't feel as if they have my interests, or the interests of most Buckhead residents, at heart, but are only in it for themselves and a handful of One-Percenter backers. They will break the new city, clean out the piggy bank, hand the remains over to developers, and then move on to their next destination, leaving them richer and the rest of us not so much.

To repeat, secession of Buckhead is probably inevitable on a long enough time scale.  But let's not hand it over to these carpet-baggers.  Not them, not now.  

We can do better.