Georgia Gets It Right

Warnock in Focus

Here’s to Georgia, for electing and now re-electing Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate, instead of Herschel ("They're bringing pronouns in our military! What the heck is a pronoun?") Walker. But Georgia wouldn’t have done it without my home county, DeKalb. Overall, Warnock carried the state by about 95,000 votes. He carried DeKalb County by 200,000.

            As it happens, Friday will be the 200th birthday of my county. It was named after Baron Johann de Kalb, a Frenchman (born in what is now part of Germany) who came to America to fight for our Revolution, and died at the battle of Camden, S.C. "So there lies the brave DeKalb," George Washington said. "The generous stranger, who came from a distant land . . . to water with his blood the tree of liberty."

            "Our ballot is a blood-stained ballot," said Warnock in his acceptance speech, in reference to Movement martyrs. He didn't dwell on sacrifice, though, or even passive resistance. He pushed for doing what needs to be done: "I can hear my dad of blessed memory say, 'Get up, get dressed, put your shoes on. Get ready!' Are you ready, Georgia? I'm ready!"

            Herschel Walker wasn't ready. DeKalb County knew it.

But I’m glad I took the time this evening to watch video of the way Walker ran when he was young and carrying a football. “Like a rhinoceros knocking everything down — he knocked his own players — knocked every player on the field, knocked ‘im down,” says, in voiceover, a coach of his from high school. “We threw the ball twice — threw it out there to start the game, threw it off when it was over. That was our passes. Third and fifty was a sweep right.”

In other words, it was Herschel running with the ball every play. “I never had a kid as focussed as Herschel was,” says the coach. “I would say stuff to him, just mention it — he’d do it. You couldn’t challenge him because he would not be denied.”

And Herschel himself: “I saw myself as transforming into a super-hero character, like Superman. Things just don’t hurt him . . . that’s a warrior. When you don’t think you can go, just take one more.”

You know what the title of Warnock’s autobiography is? The Way Out of No Way. I haven’t read that book, but its theme must have a lot in common with the way Walker made his way in football — not just knocking tacklers over, but almost embracing them — engaging them in tangles and wrenching his way away, and bursting off at an angle, and on. And in the clear, turning on world-class speed. Yet he gets caught from behind more often than you’d think. As if he’s anticipating somebody else to run into.

At the University of Georgia, he won the Heisman Trophy, as the number-one best college player. People are put off, he says, “when I say I don’t remember the ceremony, receiving the Heisman. But I don’t remember that whole Heisman season.” He left college early to play spectacularly for a team owned by Donald Trump in the upstart World Football League, which after a few seasons folded. He went on to play, and play well, in the National Football League, but never achieved quite the greatness he was expected to have in the pros.

His head sustained an inhumane amount of contact. In audio from when he was younger, he sounds a lot clearer-headed than he did while aspiring to the U. S. Senate. In a recent speech you can find on line, he admits that at one point in his past he found himself in a psychological crisis: "Next thing I know I've got a mess of problems. I'm talking about myself in third person. But I know that." Does he mean his former problems included talking about himself in the third person? Or does he think he is taking about himself in the third person when he says, "I know that"? Either way, his focus is off.

            His full name is Herschel Junior Walker. The Herschel is after his grandfather. The Junior comes from a nurse's remark at his birth, that he "looked like a junior." His father's name was Willis Walker Sr. There was a brother named Willis Walker Jr. already. So.      

            The Rev. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock is beautifully focused now. Raphael for a Biblical angel, Gamaliel for a rabbi who taught Saul of Tarsus.  (Warren Gamaliel Harding no connection.)  After Trayvon Martin was killed, Warnock wore a hoodie in the pulpit. In the Senate he volunteered to work with, get this, Ted Cruz on a highway that would benefit Texas and also Georgia. And now as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta he's in the shoes of Martin Luther King Jr.

When Dr. King was killed, Warnock told Fox News, “he was working on a sermon he never got a chance to preach, titled 'Why America may go to hell.'"

            As well it might. (Especially if we have to keep ramming our heads into each other.) But it will have to go past the Reverend Warnock.