Riesling Road Trip: Day 5 – Sad to leave Birmingham / Alabama What is the Future of Democracy in the West?

If you had told me a week or a year ago that I would be sad to leave Birmingham / Alabama, then I would have laughed. Before I arrived Birmingham meant nothing to me except Randy Newman’s sad song, but he wrote a bunch of sad songs (as well as a lot of funny ones). Then I met chef and restaurateur Frank Stitt (pictured above) and the almost blank sheet of paper in  my mind with Birmingham at the top began filling up with really interesting stuff, not least Frank Stitt’s spirit. How many people in this business manage to combine perfectionism with generosity and remain relaxed and down to earth as Frank Stitt has? Very few. I’m still trying to figure out who this extraordinary ambassador for this city and the South is. However, it seems very significant to me that he studied philosophy in Berkeley and drifted into the restaurant scene gaining inspiration through working at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse restaurant in the same town. It is surely no less significant that he returned to Alabama and chose to found his first restaurant, the Highlands Bar and Grill, in Birmingham in 1982. Doing our tasting in the restaurant’s parking lot helped attract one of the best groups of somms and wine buyers to date, which enabled us to get a glimpse of the city’s lively and colorful wine culture, and it’s culture in the widest sense of that word. This reinforced the impression I gained from our other stops in the South and  forced me to seriously revise my picture of this part of America. It also makes me want to return there as soon as possible.

Since Paul Grieco came on board the Riesling Road Trip in Austin / Texas conversation has come back to US government ‘Prism’ program to analyze the entire email correspondence of the US and the even more ambitious ‘Tempora’ program of the British government which seems to have attempted the same thing for the entire world. This is governments spying on their entire populations, and in the case of ‘Tempora’ on the entire online population of all nations. I can only speak for myself and do so as a British citizen and must say that ‘Tempora’ completely contradicts the democratic principles which theoretically are the basis of our nation and culture. If the people of Britain accept this situation, then that compromise will surely have grave consequences. We are on a slippery slope and if we don’t pull ourselves back up, then we shall slip further down in the direction George Orwell predicted in his novel ‘1984’.

Thankfully, the government of Germany doesn’t accept that the British government can spy on all their citizens and resident aliens (of which I am one) just because it feels like doing so. However, they haven’t been nearly forceful enough in rejecting this gross usurping of their sovereignty (which might be considered an act of cyber war). Thank you Edward Snowden for getting this all into the open and risking your own neck in so doing! But what about the people behind these programs? They have placed all the citizens of their own nations under 24/7 suspicion, effectively declaring them to be potential terrorists first and citizens second. That strikes me as a sign of extreme paranoia, (which might be considered a mental disorder). Extending this to the rest of the planet is an act of extraordinary arrogance, cyber-colonialism according to the motto, “we know best, we only have your best interests in mind.” We’ve learnt exactly nothing from our history, and we will suffer the consequences of this.

Thank you Frank Stitt and everyone else who came to our tasting for providing an antidote to all of this and showing us what civilized behavior is. I will return!