There are two races of interest in Blount County next month. The Meares-Duggan race is a no-brainer for progressives. But what about the Republican primary?

I plan to vote in it because, well, the Senator will not be a Democrat. So who is the best of this awful bunch? Who is the least worst Republican jerk?

Arguments I've heard for Finney: He's more transparent than most politicians and his support for the mountain-top removal ban shows him willing to spurn the wishes of local big developers and apply his religious beliefs to the environment.

For Overbey: He isn't a Christofascist extremist and is willing to work with Democrats in the Senate to pursue a more sane agenda - even if too conservative.

Negatives for Finney: He's an arch-right wing Christian fundamantalist extremist who wants to revive the Scopes law and institute the David Horowitz law at Maryville College. He's just a generally creepy religious nutcase.

Negatives for Overbey: He's a total opportunist doing the bidding of the Lamberts. He would never spurn his party on anything the way Finney did.

So who should a progressive support on August 7?

I lean toward Overbey. Finney and his ilk make non-Christians like me feel like second class citizens. That tends to override anything else he's done. But I don't say that as a compliment to Overbey. His "effective conservative leadership" slogans make me vomit. But at least I won't be embarrassed to have my home town associated with my Senator.

What do you think?

PUBLIC MEETING:

March 13, 2008 at 6:30 p.m. in the gym at the Everett Recreation Center. Review of site plans for the new intermediate school on Sevierville Road.

The John Sevier Area Residents group announce a Maryville City Meeting to discuss the impact of the new intermediate school on the Sevierville Road area. The details are as follows:

The City of Maryville has scheduled the next meeting, to be held at John Sevier School library on Tuesday evening, February 12, at 6 PM. Watch for an announcement in the newspaper. You are urged to attend, and to get the word out to folks whose neighborhoods were not represented in the first meeting last month, particularly residents along Everett High Road.

If you have questions, please reply to jsars.school@yahoo.com, which is monitored by Jennifer Franklin and Connie Miller, co-chairs of the former John Sevier 2020 group.

OK, folks, so what do those obscure German words in the title mean? A German sociologist named Ferdinand Tonnies coined these terms in 1887 to refer to two normal human association types. Roughly speaking, gemeinschaft refers to "community" and gesellschaft refers to "society." What does this mean in theory?

Gemeinschaft is a system of social relations where everybody knows everybody else, decisions are made through informal (as in not written down in law) though traditional and often ritualistic forms. The most important relationships are kinship networks; who your daddy was and what group he belonged to mattered more than what you ever did. Insiders control things; outsiders mean nothing (and the definition of outsiders is strict). Gemeinschafts are often highly inegalitarian, with social structures determined by "organic" notions of economy, family organization and religious grouping. Think small town, pre-industrial, Old South, Appalachian, feudal, high school, etc. These are all different kinds of gemeinschafts - some are more egalitarian (Appalachian) than others (plantation Old South) but they share the same sense of organic "community."

Gesellschaft is a system of social relations characterized more by formalized, bureaucratic, individual-driven processes. Law and money matter more in a gesellschaft than traditional social position or kinship networks. Gesellschafts accept change very easily, but they tend to be more alienating as "nobody knows anybody" outside their small circle of co-workers and friends. Insiders vs. outsiders matters little in a gesellschaft; but there is little sense of local tradition, heritage or pride. It's more possible to achieve success and "move up" in a gesellschaft, but neighborhoods are more likely to be segregated by class, architecture more generic, and people are more likely to be crassly materialistic. Think of a major city, new suburbs, the North, modernity, large university, etc.

These two sociological formulations are not static. And quite often one type morphs into another. After the US Civil War many Southern communities underwent this sort of transformation from plantation-driven gemeinschafts to capitalist-oriented New South cities like Birmingham, Atlanta and Dallas.

But here's where it gets interesting. To smooth the transition from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, editorialists in favor of the new order - like Atlanta's editor Henry Grady - threw a major cultural bone to the old order in the form of the Lost Cause. The same newspaper that celebrated industrialism in late 19th century Atlanta (the Constitution) printed Uncle Remus stories celebrating the Old South and offered editorials in favor of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. To smooth the way for the new bourgeois order, capitalists had to pay their respects to the plantation lords of the past.

Why do I bring these sociological terms up? Because I think the best way to understand changes in Blount County these days is to think of our community as one changing from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. You can even think of Jerry Cunningham and the County Commissioners as the sort of bridge. They're sold out to the developers who are profiting off the transformation even as they lament the loss of their own traditional authority (think of the complaints about the "new" Daily Times). I see evidence of this painful shift all the time, including: complaints about traffic and "rude" drivers, outsiders not being totally excluded but not sure if they're really accepted either, a pending Director of Schools decision pitting an insider against an outsider, a revitalized downtown received with some ambivalence by old-timers, etc.

Anyway, I wanted to put this out there because I think this website is a progressive response to the tensions over transformation from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft. Some posters here are old-timers who never liked the traditional, Republican power structure, but also don't feel comfortable with the way the county is changing. Others (like myself) are outsiders who want to help the community develop in a progressive direction but are unsure about how hard to push for fear of being labeled an interloper.

I'd love to hear other thoughts on this from BlountViews members. Sometimes it's helpful to step back and look at all the changes from a sociological perspective. At the very least, Cunningham's rants make more sense in this context.

Last night the Maryville City School Board voted to accept Director Mike Dalton's recommendations for the schools. Here's the Daily Times story, which according to my wife who was at the meeting, accurately reflects what went down.

Link...

In short, they're expanding the high school, but there's no indication yet as to which expansion plan they'll use. Will they plow down houses up to Mountain View Avenue? Much of the drama of the evening centered on neighborhood opposition to school expansion. As a resident of the neighborhood (though not close enough to be directly affected) I think the school needs to consider removing some of the parking lot if necessary to make it fit within the current space. The elephant in the room has always been the football team - they won't split into two high schools for fear of breaking up the football dynasty. But I think cost is as much an issue as anything else. High schools are VERY expensive to build. The plan now calls for construction of a new high school after 2020.

The other major decision - and of more interest to me as a parent of a kindergartener and pre-schooler - is to construct a new intermediate school. Under the new system, the intermediate schools will include 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Supposedly, this was the result of a Fourth Grade Task Force decision. My wife, who has a background in education, thinks this is BS and that the decision is all about zoning (where would a new elementary school go?), money and property sites, and not about the educational needs of children. 4th graders are not mature enough to go from teacher to teacher the way middle and high school kids are. So will the 4th graders be completely separated from the 5th and 6th graders? Also, where will the zoning line lie between MIS and the new intermediate school? In five years they will begin planning for a new elementary school.

Anyway, these are the major issues decided. Fort Craig will take in the preschool program to relieve overcrowding at Foothills Elementary. Though I'm a Fort Craig parent I'm sympathetic to the charge that Fort Craig hasn't picked up its share of overcrowding.

Any other thoughts on the Maryville City Schools expansion plan? The school system is a point of pride for the City of Maryville. It's one of the best in the state, if not THE best. The reason is not wealth per se but parental involvement. But the system is at a crossroads of sort, as thousands of new people from the Knoxville area and elsewhere in the country move to Maryville.

Just checking in! I wish I could've made it to the picnic today; it was right in the neighborhood. Anyway, I'll pass along this site to folks that I've met at MC who I know would be interested.