Davidfarrow’s Weblog

I want to thank everyone for their readership and their loyalty. I just designed an editorial page for three newspapers. This column will appear in those papers this weekend.

Stay tuned.

I encourage everyone who reads this to comment below or forward it to all your friends. Dare to dream – do both!

Back when I gave tours in 1979 and in the ensuing years, there was a bumper sticker that read, “We Don’t Give A (#%&*) (sic) Darn How You Do It In New Jersey.” To tell you the truth, we still don’t. Actually, many didn’t seem to be enamored enough with their birthplaces to stick around.

I understand that. When I was growing up here, I thought Charleston was a stifling place – a place with no opportunity, a place where your business was everybody else’s.

I went off more than once to find something I thought missing, only to find that it was missing in me. The thing is I grew up in Charleston, a small city surrounded by farmland. Everybody knew everybody not by choice, but by birth. The core of the people living Below Broad was related. My family is descended from Rene Ravenel, the leader of the Huguenot Expedition. He got here in 1686, so I couldn’t swing a flounder without hitting a cousin. To be honest, there are a few cousins I wouldn’t mind trouncing with a flounder.

Still, I have always come home. The last time before I left, I was managing editor of the Charleston Mercury and wrote a weekly column for the P&C. This was during the end of the transformation from Charleston, an old city rooted in customs and mores that have become caricatures for commodities, to Atlanta East, an urban area the size of Charlotte trying to contrive a common purpose and trying to be hip with the same attractive mien of a sixty-year old man amid a Girls Gone Wild party at Lauderdale.

A lot of natives such as myself are saddened by the change – some distraught. What I think is interesting is the refrain of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth in back bars of the old clubs about how it’s all changed, how much the area has grown. My thought has always been, “You sold it. What on earth did you expect?”

A lot of people were caught in the middle. In the rush to create communities, the landmarks were eradicated. In the rush to turn the Lowcountry into a Bizzaro theme park, the natives in between became confused.

As long as real estate was moving, many were eager to increase their market share. The dulcet tones of “Jobs, jobs, jobs” became a siren call for the reasonable. No mention of for whom — be they construction workers from Charlotte or illegal aliens that mow the lawns for the condo regimes.

The economy hummed right along… until it didn’t. What most of the people who live here now don’t remember is that the natives remember a life before money, a time when Charleston was an old lady with threadbare clothes and a razor sharp wit, a time when one could walk down the street, see a friend on the porch and by the end of the night have all your friends from childhood laughing and talking into the night.

That Charleston is gone due to the vagaries of age as much as anything else. What it has been replaced by is an artifice that increased taxes to the point that the natives could no longer hold onto the ancestral homes. Truth became spin.

What I find interesting in this shifting paradigm is that the state has become more intrusive as prosperity wanes into a memory. We natives were already punch-drunk from being told that “We are changing things because it’s good for the city.” Not the people, mind you, — the city.

I write a blog, and I got a lot of local feedback that I wasn’t sure I could use. I post this column on that blog, and last time was overwhelmed by native reaction. .

A friend named Ed wrote, “I can always count on you for your take of things. Although we have separate but equal political views I find with you, you never want to
come to a battle of wit unarmed. I am not an original Charleston native. As you know, I was sent here by the Navy because this was the only town I had never been thrown out of. Now it is 24 years later and I still haven’t been thrown out. Of course His Highness, the mayor, still has time. Keep up the good work.”

A man named Don, penned, “True journalism versus opinion-reading that masquerades for news these days is what you offer. Keep it up; it is preferable to the clank of sycophantic spurs in the public square.”

A lady whom I shall refer as “GiGi,” wrote, “The Praying Mantis is in amber.
Only you can take the DNA out and document the last two decades of Charleston’s
history ( 1950’s & 60’s) before someone let the secret out and sold our neighborhood and displaced our families.”

Another belle named Pat implored, “Do please keep informing newcomers about how unique Charleston was before the great Ohio migration, since it is barely distinguishable from any other Starbucks/PotteryBarn/GAP encrusted barnacle of a town. My grandparents would keel over in shock if they weren’t already dead. Long live Gullah!”

Our landmarks, our touchstones to the familiar have been replaced by a contrived culture that translates into a shopping outlet on the beach. The new Myrtle Beach has achieved an identity as “Biker Branson By The Sea.” New Charleston is bereft of any real identity.

The pineapple and fountain at Waterfront Park and the new Cooper River Bridge are landmarks corporate media use to foster a false sense of community. To us, the shrimp man and the flower ladies were Charleston. Twenty years ago, you would walk down Legare Street and say hello to everyone you saw because you were so taught. In return, whether you knew them or not, whether they knew you or not, the powerful and the meek would smile and return your greeting warmly. Today, one finds aloofness- a sense of entitlement that only new wealth engenders.

We old timers understood wealth. We understood that graciousness could not be bought. During our childhood, Charleston was still stripped of wealth by the occupation of a foreign power — the ruins of an ill-advised war and 130 years of economic depression and grinding poverty were evident.

I like the “come-ya’s” as much as the “been-ya’s.” People all over the world have been lured by opportunity and climate. There’s a lot of valuable talent.

What I worry about is that new people have no sense of history – neither ours nor theirs, for that matter. The majority don’t know that Charleston sits on a violent earthquake fault. The lessons of Hugo were posted on the bulletin board, then the sand dunes were bulldozed to erect high-rise condos and somehow this was thought to be a good idea. What concerns me is that the people who moved recently will find that we are not Charlotte-by-the-Sea.

We are Charleston. We are a people who endured a lot of history together. We encourage you to join us, but we really don’t give a rat’s behind how you did it in Muncie.