Since the South's interactions with the rest of the country are simply replete with examples of "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result," I've always said that southern historians would simply be forced to go out of business if we were no longer allowed to use any form of the word "irony." A contemporary case in point lies in the controversial Arizona immigration bill now under scrutiny by the United States Supreme Court. According to the federal government's brief in the case, in effectively adopting its own unilateral immigration policy focusing "solely on maximum enforcement," Arizona has tried to "interpose its own judgments" on matters strictly delegated to the Office of the President of the United States. As the Feds point out, the Immigration and Nationality Act "vested the Executive Branch with the authority and the discretion to make sensitive judgments with respect to aliens, balancing the numerous considerations involved: national security, law enforcement, foreign policy, humanitarian considerations, and the rights of law-abiding citizens and aliens." Allowing each state to establish its own immigration rules would therefore "wholly subvert Congress's goal" of establishing "a single national approach."

The New York Times was quick to point to the irony here: "The word 'interpose' is a yellow flag in the history of state and federal relations. The southern states claimed a right of 'interposition' as a basis for secession before the Civil War, and they resurrected the idea in the 1950s. (Think John C. Calhoun and the "Nullification Crisis" in the first instance and Harry F. Byrd and "Massive Resistance" in the second,) Just as they claimed the right to interpose their power between the federal government and their populations over slavery and other issues in the nineteenth century, the southern states claimed the right to ignore the Supreme Court's desegregation order in Brown v. Board of Education." (1954) Although the Supreme Court ruling in Cooper v. Aaron,(1958) "scorched" this ruse for maintaining racial discrimination in defiance of the Brown decision, the Times editorialist points to the "racial profiling" inherent in the Arizona law's mandate for aggressive interrogation and scrutiny of all Hispanics, its ultimate goal being "separation by race." This practice cannot be allowed to stand, the writer concludes because "just as racial equality was the law of the land during the desegregation era, it is the law of the land today."

Had our righteously indignant writer been a little more attentive to historical reality, he would have found even greater irony behind and within this case because, in fact, "racial equality was the law of the land" for more than half a century prior to the desegregation era as well. When the Supreme Court issued its landmark 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, it upheld racially separate accommodations and facilities so long as they were "equal" in quality. Three years later, however, in keeping with its long-standing habit of seeking the narrowest possible reading of both statutes and case law appertaining thereto, the Court declined to intervene in a case where, despite its large black population, Richmond County, Georgia, provided no high school for black children at all.

Such judicial responses were all too typical over the next two generations before the courts finally began to show some disposition to give at least a little weight to the "equal" side of the "separate-but-equal" equation. By 1950, the justices would have no truck with the state of Texas's attempt to establish, virtually overnight, a black "law school" consisting of a few rented offices and dog-eared law books and a faculty of equally rundown hacks looking to supplement the proceeds of their ambulance-chasing. No way," said the guys on the bench, that such a set up could be construed as even remotely equal to that offered by the University of Texas at Austin, with its massive law library and large, distinguished faculty.

By the middle of the twentieth century, northern critics had a hard time understanding why, for the most part, even the most racially progressive white southerners were not out rallying such supporters as they might have drummed up for an immediate, full-scale assault on Plessy. At least part of the answer lay in the fact that these folks were at that point still heavily engaged in trying to get southern officials simply to comply with it, and one might add, risking both their reputations and sometimes their lives in doing so. At that point, ventured crusading Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter, the South was "the only place in the western world where a man could become a liberal simply by urging obedience to the law."

As if to underscore Carter's point, the initial litigation coming out of Clarendon County, South Carolina, that actually spawned Brown v. Board was focused not on overturning Plessy but on forcing the local school board to at least live up to it by providing transportation for black students just as it did for whites in this black-majority county. It was only as this effort progressed that the NAACP broadened the scope of its argument to declare that regardless of the relative quality of the facilities provided, segregated public education in any form was unconstitutional.

The entrenched pattern of severe racial discrimination, even----and sometimes especially----in counties where blacks made up the majority of the population, could be traced to a variety of disfranchisement measures that prevented more than a handful of blacks at most in such areas from getting anywhere near a ballot box. Largely bereft of political influence, their only hope lay in the courts, where, despite the prodigious efforts of the NAACP, anything resembling justice for blacks was exceedingly difficult to come by. In asking how black Southerners could be so thoroughly stripped of rights expressly granted them by both the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, we come quickly to the readiness of both northern and southern jurists to willfully suspend their instincts for disbelief. In the 1898 Williams v. Mississippi ruling that paved the way for the rest of the southern states to proceed with vigor in actively disfranchising their black citizens, the Court upheld provisions in the state's 1890 constitution mandating a literacy test, as well payment of a poll tax, as prerequisites for voting. Clearly aimed at poor and illiterate blacks (although, in practice, the impossible stringency of the literacy test selectively applied to blacks meant that physicians and teachers often "failed" it as well), these two measures speedily trimmed the black electorate of a black-majority state down to 6 percent of the adult black population. Yet, because, on the face of it, the court could find no language in the Mississippi laws explicitly indicating racially discriminatory intent on the part of the state, it left these measures in place and thus left blacks in Mississippi and throughout most of the South with practically no voice whatsoever in how their local schools were operated and supported. (It was surely no coincidence that the courts and the Congress began to show interest in black rights only after the cumulative political effect of the exodus of millions of blacks from southern states where they could not vote to northern states where they could began to set in.)

At any rate, the longstanding judicial inclination to don blinders as well as robes and adhere to a narrow literalism that allowed the courts to sign off on blatant examples of state-imposed discrimination points to a final irony in our contemporary case. This one emanates not from the Arizona legislature but from none other than the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts, who must surely have struggled to suppress a grin when at the beginning of the government's argument in United States v. Arizona, he told Solicitor General Donald Verilli, "I'd like to clear up at the outset what it's not about. No part of your argument has to do with racial or ethnic profiling, does it? I saw none of that in your brief." With that issue off the table for the time being at least, the Court's conservatives were free to poke holes in the murkier and less compelling government contention that Arizona's draconian immigration statute amounts to a usurpation of both congressional and presidential prerogative. Savoring the delicious irony of seeing a New York-born, Harvard-educated chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court effectively assisting representatives of a state far removed from the old Confederacy whose ultimate aim is clearly to subvert federal authority, Calhoun and Byrd are surely somewhere cracking open a bottle of the good stuff and toasting their vindication as men not behind, but way ahead of their times.

The American passion to centennialize--especially if there's a buck to be made in the bargain--embraces not only triumphs but tragedies as well, and in both cases, the bigger the better. Thus, we were assured of some truly big-time hoopla and kerfuffle surrounding the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Persistent rumors about my age notwithstanding, I was not around for the actual event and did not share a pint or two with the navigator before he set sail. In fact, my first knowledge of the sad affair came as a child when I was rummaging through some old books and found what was basically a pictorial history of the ship and a gallery of photographs of all the rich and famous swells who were on board. As an eight-year old I was predictably amused by a photo of one Colonel and Mrs. Archibald Butt. Only later would I learn that "Archie" Butt (as he was known affectionately by friends and confidantes, including Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) was a fellow Georgian, born in Augusta. Later still, I would pick up the tale of a certain physician who was not only a Georgian but a fellow Hart Countian. Unfortunately, he was famous among the locals as the kind of fellow who was not known to drink until someone finally saw him sober. In what was surely the mother of all ironies, the good doctor had gone out and gotten himself a good snoot full the night before and consequently  missed the Titanic's maiden and only voyage. Local lore had it that when ol' Doc finally sobered up, he had piously written his good fortune off as simply "God's will." Only recently did I encounter the truly tender and touching story of a former Georgian, Isidore Strauss, who had spent part of his childhood in tiny Talbotton, Georgia, where his father, Lazarus, ran a dry goods store--until 1863, when the local Grand Jury, acting in rather mindless concert with officials in nearby towns, issued a resolution condemning "the infidel and unpatriotic conduct of the representatives of Jewish houses who had engaged in [the] nefarious business" of war profiteering. As June Hall McCash relates in her terrific new book, "A Titanic Love Story," practically everybody in town including every member of the grand jury itself came to assure Lazarus that these words were most certainly not directed at him, Mr. Strauss took the action as a "personal affront,' loaded up his wagons with family and merchandise and quickly bade Talbotton a none-too fond farewell.  Although young Isidore had attempted to enlist in the Confederate Army, after the war the family moved to New York, where Lazarus first leased space for his crockery business from the R. H Macy Company and then became an investor in the company, paving the way for his sons to eventually obtain a controlling interest in the firm.  Along the way to great wealthy and a stellar record of philanthropy, Isidore married Ida Brun, the daughter of German immigrants, who would quite literally become the love of his life, and he hers. The extent of their mutual devotion became heartbreakingly clear when Ida declined a spot in one of the Titanic's lifeboats, choosing instead to die in the icy waters of the Atlantic, cradled in the arms of her beloved Isidor.

Scholars from a variety of disciplines, (along with other assorted know-it-alls of all stripes) have noted the tendency of southern white evangelicals to find a "moral" in every tragedy. Hence among white Southerners especially, the Titanic's demise naturally became the inspiration for hundreds upon hundreds of sermons, not to mention a number of poems and several songs, the great majority of which chalked the whole sad affair up to man's arrogance in thinking that mere mortals could ever construct a ship or anything else that God or the forces of nature at his disposal could not destroy. (Think of the debacle described in Genesis when the prideful Babylonians undertook to build a tower that would reach all the way to Heaven.) This was the principal theme of Ernest V. "Pop" Stoneman's 1924 recording, "The Sinking of the Titanic:"

When they were building the Titanic, they said what they could do.
They were going to build a ship that no water could not go through,
But God with his mighty hand showed to the world it could not stand.
It was sad when that great ship went down.

There was also a stern rebuke for the rich for shunning the huddled masses fatally consigned to steerage:

When they left Eng-a-land, they were making for the shore.
The rich they declared they would not ride with the poor.
So they sent the poor below, they were the first that had to go.
It was sad when that great ship went down.

While it is true that black and white Southerners share a rich history, it is also true that they frequently experienced and perceived it quite differently. For example, Reconstruction seemed a period of liberation and great promise for blacks and one of distress and travail for whites. Accordingly, an event where more than 1,000 whites lost their lives got a distinctly different treatment at the hands of black musical artists and storytellers. For bluesman and folk artist Huddie Ledbetter, better known as "Lead Belly," the central message of the Titanic affair lay in reports that world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, a larger-than-life black folk hero who beat down any and all white challengers and showed a distinct preference for white women as sexual companions, was denied passage on the Titanic because of his race:

Captain Smith, when he got his load
Mighta heard him holl'in' "All aboa'd "
Cryin', Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well.
Jack Johnson wanted to get on boa'd;
Captain Smith hollered, "I ain' haulin' no coal."
Cryin', Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well.

Thus not only was Johnson's life spared by virtue of the Titanic's racial exclusivity, but news of the sinking moved him to break into a popular dance step:

"Jack Johnson heard the mighty shock,
Mighta seen the black rascal doin' the Eagle Rock"

Indeed, in Lead Belly's portrayal, the Titanic's doom should be cause for celebration among all black Americans:

"Black man oughta shout for joy,
Never lost a girl or either a boy.
Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well."

            In a mythical alternative version of the story, there is, in fact, one black person on the Titanic, the lowly stoker "Shine," who, after repeated attempts to warn the uncomprehending Captain that the ship is filling up with water, simply jumps overboard and swims to shore despite pleas for help from rich white men offering money and beautiful white women offering sex. Thus it ultimately comes to pass that:

"When all them white folks went to heaven,

 Ol' Shine was in Sugar Ray's Bar drinking Seagram's Seven."

Like all great historical events, the Titanic disaster yielded a vast array of human stories.  The factual details might be shaky in some cases, but depending on how they are told and interpreted--and by and for whom--every one of them has an important truth to reveal.

If one picture can be worth a thousand words (depending, of course, on the relative quality of both picture and words), the same is surely no less true of a map.  I regret that it was so late in my career when I truly began to understand the illustrative power of a good map.   Take the following example, drawn from Dave Leip's Atlas of Presidential Elections, which is the very best political map site out there in my doubtless insufficiently humble opinion. (Be advised, though, that old Dave does the switcheroo on the traditional pattern in these parts by using red for the Democrats and blue for the Repubs, apparently following the approach common in Europe and elsewhere.)

What we have here is a juxtaposition of county-level voting patterns from the 1960 and 1964 presidential elections in Georgia. That's in literal terms, however, for what it really amounts to is a snapshot of the GOP's coming-out party in Georgia, an event simultaneously celebrated and bemoaned in four other southern states in 1964.   Striking as it seems, even in retrospect, this day had been coming since the late 1930s when white southerners began to cast a wary eye toward the national Democratic party's increasingly cozy relationship with organized labor and northern blacks, whose ranks had been swelled by a flood tide of southern in-migrants seeking greater freedom and opportunity, but also fleeing a place where they could not vote for one where they could.  Sparked by a new civil rights plank in the Democratic platform, the 1948 Dixiecrat insurgency bled over into significant crossovers into the Eisenhower camp in 1952, when the GOP claimed four of the old Confederate states and 1956, when it picked up five.  The Republicans' economic conservatism had also begun to resonate with white-collar whites in the urban and emerging suburban South by the end of the 1950s.

  In the 1960 vote, which very much suggested Republicanism was on the march in Georgia, albeit not exactly at double-time,  Republican Richard M. Nixon actually  bested his former boss Dwight D Eisenhower, who had captured close to one third of the popular vote in Georgia in both 1952 and 1956.  Nixon's 37% percent showing primarily reflected the growth of Republican support in Georgia's urban counties, especially Fulton.  Although he ran a bit better than Ike in some rural counties as well, his numbers hovered around 27% in South Georgia and the Black Belt.  The caption for this illustration, then, might well read "What a Difference Four Years Can Make!" This is true especially when that span marks the explosive emergence of the sure enough, in your face, in-the-street and in-full-view of the cameras "protest" phase of the civil rights movement.  The stubborn and sometimes openly violent resistance that met the Freedom Riders, the Sit-Inners, and other demonstrations against economic and social discrimination and denial of the right to vote finally forced an extremely reluctant John F. Kennedy to stop simply talking about civil rights and finally do something. Sending troops to Ole Miss and Birmingham and dispatching brother Bobby to sprint to the head of the March on Washington in 1963, pretty much did "the Kennedys" in with a great many white Southerners, and the actions in 1964 of the traitorous Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, in pushing through the most far-reaching piece of civil rights legislation in American history would assure that his observation that the Democrats had likely lost the South "for a generation" quickly earned a prominent place in the Understatement Hall of Fame. 

This became clear enough in the 1964 presidential campaign in which Republican Barry Goldwater vowed to "go hunting where the ducks are" by using his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to persuade white Southerners to abandon the party of their hallowed forefathers.  Goldwater disdained any effort in the South even to retain the support of a vestigial core of middle-class black Republicans that dated all the way back to Reconstruction.  Hence his 87 percent tally in Mississippi amounted to what was virtually an all-white landslide in that state.  Although white voters in Georgia manifested more resistance to his charms, the dramatic about-face in voting was shocking even to seasoned political observers.  Where his Republican predecessor claimed 37% of the Georgia vote in 1960-- including the majority of black votes in Atlanta, Goldwater, with hardly a black supporter to his name grabbed 54 percent of the ballots cast. In South Georgia and the Black Belt, the curmudgeonly Arizonan captured better than 60 percent of the vote, more than doubling Nixon's numbers.  In many individual counties, Goldwater's share of the vote approached and in some cases even exceeded Kennedy's from four years earlier. In Calhoun County, for example, Kennedy had claimed 79 percent of the vote in 1960 but 86 percent went to Goldwater in 1964. The Voting Rights Act would not get on the books until the following year, and thus only 6 percent of the voting age black population of the 60 percent black county could even cast a ballot in 1964.  Twenty years later, black voters would see to it that Calhoun County gave a solid majority to Democrat Walter Mondale, a liberal Mr. Rogers to Goldwater's conservative Cookie Monster.  If, however, the Democrats hoped to offset their losses from white defections with newly enfranchised black loyalists, they were sorely disappointed, for nearly 3 million more whites than blacks registered to vote in the South over the course of the 1960s, and even with one of their own heading the ticket in 1976, the majority of this greatly expanded white electorate would never cast another Democratic vote in a presidential election.

For a time, to be sure, many of these folks insisted "I never left the Democratic party. It left me." The most telling evidence of Ronald Reagan's impact on southern politics may be that while only 40 percent of southern white conservatives identified themselves as Republicans in 1980, eight years later, that figure stood at 60 percent. Reagan's persuasiveness and charm clearly played a key in selling a less blatantly racialized version of  the old Goldwater southern strategy, one that emphasized maximizing and safeguarding the fruits of  individual achievement (as measured by economic success) over fostering social responsibility.  It also favored neighborhood autonomy (suburban neighborhoods that is) over equality of opportunity or access, all the while casting the central city and the federal government as the principal threats to the freedom of honest, God-fearing whites to enjoy the rewards attendant to their accomplishments. As the twenty-first century began, there were arguments that the old "southern strategy" had now become instead a "suburban strategy" that worked in white neighborhoods surrounding not just Atlanta or Birmingham but any number of northern cities as well. This explanation helped to explain the GOP's appeal to southern white suburbanites, but it failed to account for the continued Republican appeal to whites living beyond the southern metropolis. The raw numbers behind recent Republican majorities in the South may have come from the suburbs, but the intensity of GOP support was arguably greatest among white voters with lower incomes living in rural areas and towns too small to incorporate true neighborhoods.

Across the South in 2004, George W. Bush averaged 55 percent of the vote in metro counties and 60 percent in rural counties; his poorest showings were in urban core or central city counties and rural counties with relatively large black population percentages. Support for Bush along the I-85 corridor between Atlanta and Charlotte fit a national pattern--voters in counties just outside metropolitan areas voted for him at higher percentages than those actually within the areas themselves. His most ardent supporters in this part of the South, however, were whites in rural counties even farther from metro areas, where he collected 63 percent of the vote.   Of the eight Georgia counties that gave John McCain at least 80 percent of their votes in 2008, five were 100 percent rural; one was 99 percent and another 94 percent. A Republican strategist may have been correct in assuming in 2004 that "if you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you're voting for George Bush," but the most loyal and dependable support that Bush enjoyed in the South came from voters well acquainted with guns but more likely to be struggling to make the payments on a Ford or Chevrolet pickup than cruising contentedly around in a Lincoln or Bee-mer.  In 2008, the correlation between white household income and support for McCain in Georgia counties was actually slightly negative.  On the other hand, the percentage of all households that were white was far and away the best single predictor of a county's GOP proclivities.  This combo map (Dark Green=Whiter,more Repub,) courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Georgia Statistics System--check'em out, you'll see what I mean--is a window not just on the politics of Georgia, or even the South, but on the nation.

 Purely and simply, here in Georgia and damn near everywhere else in this great nation of ours, the most Republican places are most likely anywhere that's overwhelmingly rural and white.    The Repubs may be preaching to the 'burbs nowadays, but, even if the text has been upgraded, the folks out in the boondocks know the real message hasn't changed.

In the forty-three years that the Ol' Bloviator has taught United States history in both state universities and the public schools, he has done his dead-level best to resist the temptation to turn his lectern into a "bully pulpit" for proselytizing  his own political gospel according James.. Not surprisingly, the OB also gets his back up when others, with no particular preparation in the field but a truckload of ideological axes to grind, attempt to prescribe both the content of historical curricula and the lessons that are to be drawn from them. A textbook example of such an effort to control the textbooks is Georgia Senate Bill 426, introduced by Sen. William Ligon (R., Brunswick) and others and  currently under subcommittee review. "The Teach Freedom Act" seeks to "modify requirements for instruction" in U.S. history and other related social studies disciplines. In keeping with the spirit of a similar initiative launched with Tea Party backing in Tennessee, this legislation is premised on the belief that "a positive understanding of American history and government is essential to good citizenship." The problem from the get-go here is that the bill seeks a positive understanding rather than an informed one. Hence, it would require teachers to impart "an understanding of the mandate of the British government that required slavery in the colonies and the actions of various Founders who always opposed slavery, as well as early civic and religious movements to end slavery, and the self-correcting constitutional language the Founders included to allow the nation to end the institution of slavery...."

This item is particularly distressing because it suggests first of all that the sponsors of this bill are themselves poorly informed of the history of their own state. If there was a British "mandate" requiring slavery in the colonies, how was it that in 1735 the House of Commons passed a resolution affirming the initial decision of Georgia's Trustees to ban slavery in the colony? Likewise, the "self-correcting constitutional language" supposedly drafted by the Founders "to allow the nation to end the institution of slavery" actually applied not to slavery itself, but to "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit," i.e., the international slave trade, and even then it prevented Congress from taking action against that trade for the next twenty years. President Thomas Jefferson supported the act of Congress that forbade further international commerce in human property after 1808, but for all his public display of angst over the issue, like several of the other founding fathers who are described in SB 426 as "always opposed to slavery," he proved extremely reluctant to free more than a few of his own bondsmen. Ironically, in combination with the rising demand for labor sparked by the introduction of the cotton gin in 1793, the ban on further importation of Africans actually helped to boost slave prices, thereby proving quite the financial boon for Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and other slave-holding presidents and prominent statesmen.  The fact that these men held slaves does not mean that they deserve no credit for their various contributions to our infant republic, but covering up that fact simply clouds our understanding of  how slavery managed to hang around so long in a nation ostensibly dedicated to freedom and equality.

The proposed bill's off-kilter references to slavery barely scratch the surface in revealing its manifold inaccuracies and unsubstantiated generalizations about the often complex and by no means consistently orthodox attitudes of our early leaders toward religion, "free enterprise," and the "democratic process." There is also reason for concern in its rigidly prescribed, severely front-loaded version of American history, which leans so heavily on the first six presidential administrations that only two of the documents it stipulates for inclusion in the accepted curriculum appear to bear directly on events that transpired after 1832. There is also the provision that "instruction, activities, and curricula in United States history, particularly in the high school curriculum, shall be taught chronologically...." History is more than a mere succession of events. It typically happens across broad expanses of time and not necessarily in linear fashion. Students may like the idea of simply memorizing the main events of each year from 1776 to 1787, but such an approach promises little in the way of a comprehensive understanding of developments such as "growing dissatisfaction with the Articles of Confederation," a mandated point of emphasis in SB 426.

The framers came up with a pretty remarkable document in 1787, but surely not even their most ardent admirers could credibly contend that either they or the words they put to page actually anticipated the many roadblocks and circuitous detours that our nation would encounter on its way to where we are now, any more than the most prescient currently among us ( Are you listening, Newt?) have the faintest clue about what things will be like in the year 2237. Regardless of whether it best serves the agenda of Glenn Beck or Jesse Jackson, to institutionalize such a one-dimensional and misinformed narrative of the past based on a heavily ideologized perspective on the present is to encumber future generations with a version of history that they may hardly recognize, much less find instructive.

(An earlier version of this harangue ran on Maureen Downey's excellent  blog  at the AJC. If you go over there, don't miss the comments.  They include such

gems as :  Well, at least Cobb had the decency to name his blog

appropriately - Cobbloviate indeed. To say that Cobb is a bit "full of

himself" is an understatement. Holy cow.)

The Ol' Bloviator's recent scarcity around these parts owes primarily to the arrival of our new granddaughter, Virginia Catherine, on February 1. Though the O.B. feels precisely the same flood of emotions as overwhelmed him when her older brother showed up just twenty-two months ago, he has sworn to spare his long-suffering readers the tsunami of gushy sentimentality that he unloosed on that occasion. He does, however, want to pass along one thing that failed to register so much in the first instance but caught his attention this time around is the remarkable facial elasticity of newborns. At various times within a single day even, the OB was struck by V.C.'s  absolutely astonishing resemblance to her mother, father, brother, and paternal great-grandmother, not to mention Winston Churchill and John Goodman.

In addition to the ongoing Republican primary saga, which just keeps getting funnier/sadder/scarier, much of the shouting, posturing, and general agitation that managed to penetrate the O.B.'s grandparental entrancement revolved around Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010. Terms like "inequality" and "disparity" are typically associated with liberal laments about interracial gaps in income, opportunity, or educational achievement. In this case, however, Murray confines himself to the honky side of the color divide. Yet he, too, is upset about a growing class divide between upper-income and lower-income whites, not so much in economic standing as in basic human values. Despite his long-standing affiliation with a conservative think-tank, Murray performs the Republican equivalent of a "Black Mass" in his new book by essentially chanting backward what one reviewer describes as the familiar GOP/Tea Party mantra  about the silent majority of "devout and industrious" working-class whites whose rock-solid virtues and values are held in absolute contempt by a "politically liberal elite that disdains family, despises religion, and celebrates indolence with government handouts." In Murray's view, nowadays, it is actually  affluent, highly-educated white "swells" who are  the more virtuous, morally elevated Americans, while the working-class whites who were traditionally hailed as the embodiment of the most admirable aspects of our national character have obviously gone to Hell in the proverbial handbasket. 

In support of what the lit-crit types might call this "declension narrative," Murray points to survey data indicating that although "secularism" has been on the rise among  Americans across the board, nearly 32 percent of upper-class whites between 30 and 49 now attend religious services regularly while their working-class counterparts are only half as likely to darken the church door on a consistent basis. Likewise, where the share of well-heeled whites in this age group who are married has held relatively steady at 84 percent since the mid-1980s, among the corresponding segment of the white working-class population, this figure has plummeted from 70 to 48 percent. Finally, for all the outcry about unwed mothers among blacks and Latinos, Murray's numbers show that the rate of out-of-wedlock births among white women with no more than a high school education has soared from just 6 percent in 1962 to an astonishing 44 percent in 2008.

On the face of it, this data would appear not only to offer little comfort to the Republican right but to affirm liberal arguments that such a disintegration of social fabric is primarily the consequence of declining economic circumstances and prospects for lower-income groups. Murray will have none of this bleeding-heart claptrap, however. The withering of what he sees as traditional American values within the white working class is not a function of their slumping economic prospects, a phenomenon he sees as exaggerated in any case, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Rather Murray believes that the "deterioration" we are witnessing now was actually "jump-started" by the radically changed social policies of the 1960s, which he charges, "made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband . . . or to get along without a job if you were a man." In the latter case, Murray cites figures showing that the share of "prime-age males" with no education past high school who identify themselves as "not available for work" rose from 3 percent in 1968 to 12 percent 40 years later. For good measure, he points out that only 10 percent of employed working-class white men in 1960 worked fewer than 40 hours a week, as compared to 20 percent today. (It's not clear whether Murray realizes that massive employers like Wal-Mart and a number of others specialize in holding worker hours under 40 per week, either to evade certain benefit obligations or perhaps in some cases to avoid further layoffs.)

Murray is a smart and skilled provocateur known for dishing out evidence he likes with real flair, while blowing past anything that seems to undermine his arguments. He has raised hackles before by arguing that the rich are not only smarter but more deserving than the working class. In his view, you see, intelligence is fundamentally genetic,  and since brainiac , high-achieving adults celebrate and nurture it in their spawn, the nation's so-called white elite is purely and simply both an economic and intellectual meritocracy.  (Contrary to widespread perceptions, apparently there is really no such thing as a lucky slug who just happened to inherit well.)  There's a ton of both economic and sociological evidence that undermines Murray's arguments, many of which also involve leaps of faith across chasms gaping enough to make Evel Knievel pee himself. For instance, he seems to assume that up until the 1960s, the great majority of low-income Americans pursued and practiced virtue as its own reward, independently of their economic standing or their genuine prospects of bettering it. As someone of working-class origins who came of age in the 1960s, the O.B. simply took it as a given that he would have to work his tail off to elevate his circumstances. He also realized long ago that he was nonetheless quite fortunate in confronting a good many opportunities to do just that. His parents had, in fact, taught him that virtue was its own reward, but the old Puritan notion that "doing good" in the human realm was critical to "doing well" in the material realm was  still part of the American social ethos at that point, and it likewise encouraged the O.B. to simply internalize the feeling that an aggregate of affirmative traits such as a good work ethic, marital fidelity, parental responsibility, respect for the law, and regard for the feelings and needs of others, went hand-in-hand with improving his lot in life.  (The O.B. vigorously denies any intent here to suggest that the good fortune that has actually come his way is by any means a reflection of his personal virtue. Rather, this good fortune  seems more likely an affirmation of the old precept that "The Lord looks after fools and children.")

The point is, though, that among the young adults of O.B.'s generation and perhaps the one that followed it, there was noticeably greater confidence in the prospects for self-betterment than we have seen since, and indeed, today the relative deficiency in such faith is almost as readily apparent among many of the young collegians the O.B. encounters in the classroom as it is among today's unemployed offspring of welders, pipefitters, and longshoremen, many of whom, as Murray's own data suggests, now despair of ever finding work doing anything that has a real future.  Yet Murray seems unwilling to concede that the decline of morality and virtue he sees among the white working class is related in any significant way to a corresponding decline of real and perceived opportunity for advancement.   Whether he is correct or not will be easy to discern soon enough in the conduct of the currently maturing generation of Americans born to upper-middle-class circumstances that they will almost certainly find far more difficult to sustain than their parents did to achieve.

The ol' Bloviator has been accused more than once of going to bed with the chickens, but truth be told, he frequently is already prone and dreaming that somehow Herschel Walker has regained his eligibility before most of the yard fowl have even started to yawn. This means that he is not exactly a regular viewer of "Saturday Night Live," a fact that is occasionally a source of regret, though less so right now than usual. After all, who needs SNL when the ongoing Republican presidential primaries present an epic, ongoing, comic reality so hilariously absurd in and of itself that it all but defies parody?

 My favorite part of the whole process came way back when, apparently confusing the effects of Viagra with feelings of patriotism, Newton Leroy Gingrich sought to blame his intense love of country for his record of marital infidelities. In the interest of time and space, though, let's just pick up with the Iowa caucuses, where the object is to entice the most people  to cram into Moose Lodges and school cafeterias across the state and cluster beneath a banner or placard bearing the candidate's name. Typically, the winner attracts fewer folks than are likely to turn up for a Vanderbilt home game, and in this year's Iowa follies, Mitt Romney was initially awarded the victory by virtue of scraping together a crew that was thought to exceed Rick Santorum's turnout by just eight more or less warm bodies. This was considered a strong showing by Santorum at the time, although sources told the OB that the thing might have been a dead heat at that point had Marge Kachinkis of Garden Grove (pop. 232) simply checked the expiration date on the Chicken -of-the-Sea can before serving her traditional pre-caucus tuna and noodles to her husband Herb and three other couples. This group's affinity for that nice young fellow from Pennsylvania was stronger than horseradish, but, alas, they were unable to have their heads counted and their stomachs pumped at the same time. Unfortunately, it seems, the OB's information was about as out of date as Marge's tuna. The real story now seems to revolve around a badly scorched tally sheet recently plucked from the ashes of the Sageville (pop. 289) Volunteer Fire Hall, which had burned to the ground just a few hours after the last thoroughly Caucasoid caucusers abandoned the premises. At any rate, according to the revised count (and much to the delight of Marge, Herb and their former friends), Mr. Santorum actually prevailed in Iowa with a veritable landslide plurality  of thirty-four. In a bit of outrageous spin-meistering truly worthy of old Newt, Romney, who had hailed his earlier mis-proclaimed eight-person triumph in Iowa as a tremendous victory, was quick to declare his thirty-four-body shortfall "a virtual tie."

Romney had been leading in New Hampshire polls even before the initial Iowa miscount came in, but after his altogether foreseen triumph right in his own backyard, the pundit kingdom was nonetheless abuzz with talk that a victory in South Carolina, where he appeared to be leading by a fairly significant margin, would be practically tantamount to capturing the nomination. To say that the final few days of campaigning in South Carolina went horribly wrong for the Mittster is akin to saying that the Titanic encountered some misfortune on its maiden voyage. Not only was he stripped of his Iowa prize, but even as he waffled in the face of persistent badgering to disclose his personal finances, he succumbed briefly to an attack of what may yet prove to be terminal candor, letting it slip that his tax rate was typically in the 15 percent range (in other words, less than half that of his gardener's) because most of his income arose from investments whose proceeds were taxed as capital gains, save, of course, for "not very much," say $374,000 or so, that he earned in speaking fees. This incident immediately evoked the tin-eared Romney's offer back in Iowa to bet Rick Perry $10,000 on Americans' opinion on a healthcare issue. Needless to say, subsequent revelations that some of his investments might be sunning themselves in a cozy Cayman Islands tax shelter or two didn't do him a lot of good either. Still, as the January 21 balloting approached, the Republican aspirant who appeared to be in the hottest water was none other than old nine-lived Newt himself, for some thirty-six hours before the polls were to open, ABC was scheduled to run an interview with the second of Newt's jilted spouses, Marianne, whose revelations, it was said in hushed tones, held the potential to derail his roller coaster of a campaign in one swell foop. This was bad news indeed for Newt, who seemed to have found his "voice" at last, coyly deriding Barack Obama as "the food-stamp president" while pounding Romney as a born-on-third-base, preppy elitist, and generally making Romney's job-cutting spree at Bain Capital the bane of poor Mitt's existence. In fact, the online political oddsmaker "Intrade" showed Gingrich's prospects for victory in the Palmetto state soar from 6 percent on January 18 to 66 percent two days later. Still, Ms. G #2's revelation that America's horniest super-patriot had asked her for an "open marriage"--so as to continue his torrid trysta with Callista, the woman who is now Ms. G #3--would surely be the ruination of anyone seeking votes in a state that was home not only to rigidly fundamentalist Bob Jones University but to a whole bevy of other Bible-beating, fire-baptized, penniless holocaustals. Sound as it seemed, however, such thinking failed to take proper account of just how loathsome the prospect of Mitt Romney as the nominee apparently is to the great majority of South Carolina Repubs. Thus it was that our poor little rich guy fell from 35 percent support in a January 16 survey to 28 percent of the actual vote on January 21, while over the same span Newt-the-Outrageous jumped from 21 percent in the earlier poll to 40 percent at the actual polls. South Carolinians, it seemed, went for Newt's strategy of attacking the media for daring to report on his transgression. As to the transgression itself, it was expected that women voters in South Carolina would be especially put off by it, but in the true southern fashion, the actual gender gap in voting was negligible, as exit polls showed Gingrich with 38 percent of the female vote as opposed to 42 percent of the male vote. The best guess here is that many South Carolina women actually thought an "open marriage" was one in which they might be free to express an occasional opinion or two, and although their husbands found the idea a dubious one at best, they decided to humor the girls, knowing all the while that such a notion would never really catch on in their state. Speaking of open marriages, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whose rumored history of surrendering to the temptations of the flesh herself has earned her the unflattering sotto voce sobriquet "Nookie" in some quarters, also took it on the chin after giving her heartiest endorsement to Mitt.

This lesson from the Palmetto State was not lost on the former governor of the sunshine State, Jeb Bush, who remains popular and apparently plans to stay that way by withholding an anticipated endorsement of Romney and declaring himself neutral. As the Florida fray beckons, the situation seems reminiscent of the sad tale of the little boy who was so ugly that his mama had to hang a pork chop around his neck to get the dogs to play with him. In this case, the question becoming clearer every day is whether Mitt Romney has enough money to buy himself the Republican nomination or perhaps even whether in fact there is enough money out there anywhere to buy it for him. On the other hand, it is certain enough that considerable cash is also being invested in trying to keep him off the ticket. Surely nothing in the whole silly business is more laughable in its hypocrisy than the preference of the evangelical Protestant right for a serial bed-hopper and sleazy, self-aggrandizing con artist recently and conveniently converted to Roman Catholicism over a tee-totaling, one-woman man who actually appears to practice what his faith preaches. Despite this obviously photo-shopped picture of him and his wife, Ann, Mitt Romney has declined thus far to reveal whether he wears the "temple garment'" otherwise known as Mormonism's "magic underwear."

Every time the ol' Bloviator encounters a sentence such as the above, be it in a student paper or (gasp!) the New York Times, he realizes that historians of American education will one day mark the widespread abandonment of the practice of diagramming sentences as a major milestone along its path to decline. Even a hurried, rudimentary attempt to decline the sentence above would have demonstrated that, as written, it had devastation rather than the journalist doing the traveling.

In other words, as the saltier grammarians might put it, the writer had let his participle dangle where it didn't belong and in doing so had mangled the meaning of the sentence into absurdity.

To offer but one additional example, courtesy of
Slate, of the potential benefits of sentence diagramming, had there been some coercive measure sufficiently horrible and threatening to force her to diagram one of her sentences, Sarah Palin might have actually seen what a god-awful mess they were. For instance,

It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where--where do they go?

would look like this: :

On a broader scale, the practice of breaking sentences down into an organizational schematic--think about dissecting a frog absent the upchuck factor--was a vital step in the process of teaching students not just how the parts of speech function within the sentence but how sentences were to be constructed so that the writer or speaker's meaning was clearly and correctly conveyed. Admittedly, it was a tedious, time-consuming task for students to perform and for teachers to grade, and it also required not just an understanding of the parts of speech themselves but a disciplined faith in the importance of using them properly. Hence, as we moved into the post-structural age, in which all forms of communication were valued equally and self-serving clichés such as "thinking outside the box" conveniently devalued many of the traditionally most challenging aspects of the teaching and learning process, critics of diagramming began to ask "Why do we place such a great emphasis on diagramming? I remember it being a great source of frustration for me in school. And I don't want to pass that on to my children."

God forbid that we subject our little darlings to anything that might prove challenging, and therefore frustrating, to them--and, ultimately, us. Besides, reasoned another skeptic, "If the goal is communication, why does the student have to know that what he is saying is a noun or verb, etc. . . . If a student can properly write a sentence, why does he have to know all of the parts of that sentence? I just don't get it."

That this argument actually came from "an engineer and a teacher" renders it all the more distressing. Based on this logic, why worry about how a cantilevered bridge actually works so long as you know what one looks like? Why dissect a frog so long as the student can tell live ones from dead ones and understands that their legs taste damn good fried? For that matter, why should a pilot have to understand the intricate mechanics of his plane so long as he knows which levers to pull and buttons to push?

It was clearly easier on all concerned to jettison the old-fashioned and cumbersome process of breaking sentences down into visual models and proceed with vigor to the more subjective, loosey-goosey exercise of reading Tom Sawyer or David Copperfield. The justification here was that someone (no one seems to know exactly who) once declared that "the great writers of this world do not become great writers by diagramming sentences, but rather by reading good books, using their writing tools and practicing their writing."

It is true enough that some largely self-taught writers of the current generation say that they honed their skills by reading tons of great literature and trying to emulate it in their own writing until they found their own "voice." This might be true, but who is to say that their appreciation of the literary giants might not have been considerably richer and ultimately more instructive had they come to their task with a fuller understanding of the mechanics by which it was produced. Moreover, I'm not buying into the notion that most of the great writers we're talking about here were bereft of any experience in sentence diagramming. Take for example, Gertrude Stein, who once insisted, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." I really don't know if I'd go quite that far, Gertie, but I do know that a lot of writers in the late nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries had experiences with diagramming sentences, not just in English but in Latin, German, and other languages as well.

For that matter, one need only examine the literary precision in the writing of many everyday folk in that bygone era to see evidence of some hard-core training in word usage and sentence structure. From that perspective, letters to the editor from that era are frequently far more grammatically felicitous than anything written by most professional journalists or editors today. Take, for example, this February 14, 1896, missive to the Marion County [Ga.] Patriot from Ms. OB's rather modestly educated great-grandfather, Rev. Thomas R. McMichael:

Mr. Editor, These are perilous times. . . . It seems that our country is becoming the boasted asylum of the oppressed of all lands. Our doors have been thrown open and men of every clime have been invited to come and partake of our bounty and share in our glory and they have not been slow to accept the invitation. Thousands are flocking to our shores, bringing with them every type and phase of character, and every conceivable habit of life and shade of political and religious opinion. . . . Thus we have a similarly heterogeneous population of very nearly every nationality and tongue, of every color, from lily white to ebony--of every degree and form of vicious ignorance, of every type and grade of English, French and German infidelity, intermixed and overlapped with the exuberant vices of our fast American life.

Once you get over being shaken by the decidedly contemporary ring of the sentiments expressed, ask yourself if you typically find such views expressed with nearly such organizational care and grammatical precision today. The good Rev. may have been a nativist, but as his numerous published sermons also attest, at least he was a literate one, and I'm guessing that he would be more than a little pleased to learn what a first-rate editor his great-granddaughter turned out to be. Though he would seem to have little in common with the superbly educated Bowdoin College Phi Beta Kappa Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rev. Tom would surely have seconded Hawthorne's observation that

Christmas is one of those milestone events whereupon we are prone to meditate on the happenings of Christmases past and all that has happened since Christmas last. For all his inclinations to cynicism, the ol' Bloviator has always been a sucker for this holiday, with all of its connotations of love, warmth and generosity of spirit, this despite all of the efforts to turn it from a figurative Ode to Joy into a literal orgy of materialism and extravagance. When we are young, of course, Christmas is all about anticipation--the lights, glitter, treats and, it goes without saying, that special bike with the big handlebars and banana seat that will instantly vanquish all our anxieties about Mom and Dad's increasingly frequent shouting matches and Grandpa's troubles with his memory and make us absolute Master of all that we survey.

 The OB's favorite Christmas was all about anticipation too, but it came a little later,  when he was courting the future Ms. OB. Smack in the middle of his junior year in college, the OB was surviving on pork and beans and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not exactly rolling in discretionary dough.  With Ms. OB-to-be scheduled to arrive a day or two after  St. Nick, he had found a temporary, seven-day  job at $5 per day doing various odd jobs around a combination filling station, hardware store, etc. in order to bolster his bankroll as much as possible.  Thus it came to pass that he spent a frigid and windy Christmas Day, 1967 shoveling and sacking coal that would be sold to the store' s decidedly low-income patrons, many of whom found even oil heat, much less gas or electric, simply beyond their means.  Despite the cold and exertion, though, the OB can recall no happier or satisfying December 25 than this one, and he recalls with special pleasure, wining and dining his beloved in the finest style, courtesy of the hard-earned $35 that, needless to say went a great deal further in that simpler and clearly cheaper time.  As far the OB is concerned, it was clearly the best investment he ever made, for it paved the way the way for forty-two plus wonderful years in partnership with a very special person.  

When he reflects on Christmas last, the OB recalls his truly childlike anticipation of being part of his grandson's very first Christmas.  Begging your indulgence he shares this excerpt from last year's Yuletide musings:

Barrett's first snapshot on Santa's lap has been captivating me for days, consistently reminding me of the fact that Christmas should convey the pure innocence and wonder that only an infant can manifest. This, of course, leads into my annual posting of Joyce Kilmer's "Kings," which was composed during the living hell of World War I, before that gruesome and ultimately senseless conflict took its composer's life:

The Kings of the earth are men of might,
And cities are burned for their delight,
And the skies rain death in the silent night,
And the hills belch death all day!
But the King of Heaven, Who made them all,
Is fair and gentle, and very small;
He lies in the straw, by the oxen's stall

When I read every day about our courageous young men who are being killed or horribly maimed every day in Afghanistan, I can't help but question the reasons behind such sacrificial slaughter and remember that many of these young heroes are not even two decades removed from the warm, cuddly, infinitely curious and wide-eyed little boy I can't wait to hold as close as I can for as long as I can. 

This year, Barrett remains all those things, although he is now fully ambulatory and picking up new words ( Careful, Grandpa OB!) at the rate of about one per minute.  He has no idea, of course, that , God willing, at the tender age of twenty months, he will soon be assuming the awesome responsibility of being big brother to a newly arrived little sister.  Thus, bless his heart,  this stands to be his last year as the only star in the Christmas firmament for his doting and utterly devoted parents and grandparents.   The OB, for one, is fully committed to doing whatever it takes to help him  make the absolute most of his final solo days in the spotlight, provided of course, it doesn't involve shoveling coal.  The OB may still have heart of a child where Christmas is concerned, but unfortunately he now has the back of a grandpa. 

PS.  It would not seem like Christmas at all without the annual display of the OB's Christmas light show, offered once again  with the indulgence of the 1994 GMC pickup that he is at once illuminating and humiliating.

Xmas Truck.AVI

Nor would it be quite right for him to forego the annual totally corny pleasure he derives from offering  his warmest greetings of the season to the faithful patrons of this site and saluting his worthy adversaries over at the Georgia Institute of Technology with a hearty " Felice Bobby Dodd!"

I have to admit that I took considerable umbrage at New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni's reference to Newt Gingrich as a "bloviating garbanzo bean" (You'd never guess that Bruni is a former food columnist, right?) who is currently the most popular offering on the Republican Party's salad bar of PGNM ("Please God Not Mitt") presidential options. It's true enough that Newt is bad to "orate verbosely and windily" (especially after he's had a few garbanzos himself), which meets the definition of "bloviate" offered on this very site. To my way of thinking though, the digressions, redundancies, and recurrently mangled metaphors of a true bloviator may make him a bit boring, but these traits otherwise mark him as harmless and may even prove endearing. Let's face it, Newt is never boring, he's anything but harmless, and there ain't nothing about him that's the least bit endearing.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if blame for today's bitterly polarized national political climate could be laid at the feet of a single duly elected representative of the people, the wingtips in question would belong to none other than Newton Leroy Gingrich. Newt's bullying, slash-and-burn style, which dictates that he must demonize any and all who might question his motives or proposals, makes him a valuable ally in the heat of a highly partisan Capitol Hill firefight, and as one commentator has observed, his at once bombastic and patronizingly professorial pronouncements reducing inordinately complex matters to simple truisms do indeed make him "a stupid person's idea of what a smart man sounds like."

Way back yonder in 1998 when Newt resigned from Congress in a state of what seemed like career-ending disgrace just four years after taking credit for the GOP gaining control of Congress for the first time since 1952, I observed in print somewhere or other that, not unlike American patriot firebrand Samuel Adams in 1776, Gingrich was far better suited to fomenting a revolution than building on one. Apropos of old Sam, I even proposed that we commission someone to brew up some "Newt," a beer that came on strong at first before leaving a decidedly bitter aftertaste. It seems these days that Gingrich might be more aptly compared to Rocky Balboa, for he is not only in the mix for the Republican presidential nomination, but leading both his GOP rivals and Barack Obama in several early primary state polls. Needless to say, this has wedgied the knickers not only of a great many Democrats but quite a few Republicans as well. My instinct though is that Newt's comeback has come about as far back as it's coming.

 Despite his fairly egregious garbanzo metaphor, Bruni is correct in pointing out that Newt is simply the current choix du jour on a rotating buffet of unlikely Republican nominees who have enjoyed a few days of favorable perception courtesy of the likely nominee Mitt Romney, who appears to have opted for the seemingly counterintuitive political maneuver of minimizing his visibility and thereby the possibility that he might actually be forced to take a position on something--make that anything--of genuine import.  On the one hand, Romney's calculated evasiveness reflects his fear of being exposed as  a closet moderate and therefore anathema to many in his own party.  Yet, laying low is still arguably  the best strategy for one who knows that he can become the Republican standard-bearer only by default. Hence, the Mittster must skulk about in the shadows as, one-by-one, his rivals, with hair already ablaze, proceed to self-immolate completely under the hot, unforgiving glare of the spotlight. At this point the GOP is like nothing so much as a young bride-to-be who, as the terrifyingly decisive day of her nuptials fast approaches, opts for a string of desperate, last-minute flings with her previous suitors just to make sure that they are all as truly outrageous as she remembers before she surrenders to the inevitable hitch-up with the tamer-but-lamer nerd from next door.

Thus, first we witnessed a vigorous flirtation with attention-deficit poster child Rick Perry, who thinks that promising his audience he will make three points before coming up with only two is still a pretty dang good average. Poor Rick also struggled to keep the legal drinking age and the voting age separate and to remember precisely the date when those of voting age are supposed to show up and do their thing. Then came the highly successful but ultra-horny pizzapreneur extraordinaire Herman Cain, who scoffed at the notion that a candidate for the presidency of the United States should be expected to "know anything about foreign policy," this after demonstrating more than once that at least one such candidate surely could not be expected to. Then again, ol' Herman wouldn't really have required such knowledge had he been able to convince eighty-eight-year-old Henry Kissinger to sign on as his secretary of state.

Unfortunately for those who see politics as a spectator sport, Cain has been forced to suspend his campaign for now, but determined to keep his message before the people, his folks are hurriedly erecting http://thecainsolutions.com/. Given what we know or have pretty good reason to suspect about his libido though, I think I'd be really careful about any solutions that I might pick up from Herman Cain, if you catch my drift. Relative to his fairly brief tenure in the spotlight, the two bimbo eruptions and rumors of others that accompanied Cain's surge in the polls not only made Bill Clinton look like a militant monogamist by comparison, but they surely must have engendered some suppressed envy in the serial fornicator who succeeded him at the top of the Republican heap. As we learned later, Newt was busily cementing that reputation even as he was doing his best to round up a crucifixion mob for his fellow womanizer  over in the White House back there in the late 1990s. By way of a cautionary political tale, we should recall here that the louder Gingrich and his crew yelled for ol'  Bubba's scalp, the higher the guilty-as-sin target of their vituperation seemed to soar in the polls. Another month of such attacks and Clinton might well have been declared both President and Philanderer-in-Chief for life.

As far as Newt is concerned, when it comes to skeletons, you can forget his closet. Herman Cain's house isn't big enough to hold them all, and Gingrich is manufacturing new ones all the while. For example, he and Mrs. G. #3 are now aggressively peddling their books out there on the hustings (Hers, Sweet Land of Liberty, is for the kiddies, and the main character is "Ellis the Elephant."), but even as his aides beg for donations, rather than funneling their book proceeds into his perpetually tapped-out campaign war chest, the Gingriches are pocketing the money themselves. Beyond that, for all the massive attention he's getting right now, you can rest assured that it still ain't nearly enough for Newt. His typical pattern in these circumstances is to issue successively more outrageous edicts and claims (such as "there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us") until his utterly self -constructed aura finally collapses under the weight of its own preposterousness. There's a reason why his unfavorable ratings soared during his high-profile tenure as Speaker of the House in the mid-1990s and never fell below 43 percent, which is precisely where they stand today. 

The great irony here is that, as David Brooks astutely suggests, of all the desperately sought alternatives, none is more similar to the fundamentally centrist Romney than Gingrich, who made no secret of his disdain for doctrinaire "laissez-faire" conservatism when he wrote, "The opportunity society calls not for a laissez-faire society in which the economic world is a neutral jungle of purely random individual behavior, but for forceful government intervention on behalf of growth and opportunity." In fact, Gingrich's faith in the power and efficacy of such intervention is sometimes enough to make even a big-government liberal a little uneasy. Check out his call for establishing "a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon's resources" and his proposal for "a mirror system in space [that] could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways." There also is a certain irony in the fact that while the severely buttoned-down Romney seems straight out of the Republicans' beloved 1950s, Gingrich exhibits the "narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence, and intemperance" that makes them despise the liberal, freewheeling 1960s.

In the end, the sudden outbreak of Newtmania clearly has less to do with his ideas (about which, one suspects, many who are currently rallying to him probably have no real idea) than his opportunism and temperamental affinity for demonizing the so-called liberal elite, because as Brooks observes, "most people just want somebody who can articulate their hatreds, and Gingrich is demagogically happy to play the role." Barack Obama may well lose the presidency in 2012, but it won't be to Newt Gingrich. In fact, as of now, the only potential Republican challenger who can make that happen has, for the time being at least, become little more than a squirming, discomfited spectator looking on helplessly as his party toys with a succession of alternatives who can't.

The odds are that darn few Minnesota parents cast their first adoring gaze on a newborn expecting that their little bundle of joy will grow up to become a southerner, much less a larger-than-life, iconic one. Yet, by golly, that's just what happened to a Minneapolis boy born in 1922 as Lawrence Harry--but known to millions in these parts as "Larry"--Munson, whose recent passing now casts something of a pall over his beloved Georgia Bulldogs' upcoming annual tilt with archrival Georgia Tech.

After World War II, Munson used his Army discharge pay to enroll in broadcasting school but matriculated for only nine weeks or so before snagging his first radio job at tiny KDLR in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. From there he bounced around some before landing in Cheyenne Wyoming, where his new colleague, friend, and famous sportscaster-to-be Curt Gowdy recommended him to handle the University of Wyoming broadcast duties after Gowdy moved on to call minor league baseball in Oklahoma City. Like any good sports broadcaster of that era, Munson had the requisite stories about re-creating football play-by-play from tickertape, and he claimed that he got the Wyoming gig only after fabricating an audition tape of a football game between Ohio State and Minnesota, replete with canned crowd noise and special effects.

 Gowdy had advised him that his best hope of making any real money lay in calling baseball games, however, and Munson made his way to Nashville in 1947, where he became the raspy voice of the Knoxville Vols and later the Vanderbilt Commodores as well. An avid outdoorsman, he also hosted ''The Rod and Gun Club,'' which quite possibly was the first such show ever aired on local television. When professional sports burst on the scene in Atlanta, Munson appeared to get his long-sought "big break" in 1966 when he won a spot on the first broadcast team for the newly arrived Atlanta Braves. Unfortunately--or not, depending on your perspective--the Braves egomaniacal marquee announcer Milo Hamilton soon made it plain that the booth just wasn't big enough for both him and Munson, and this stint proved to be short-lived. Just as he joined the Braves for spring training, however, Larry had learned that the longtime voice of the Georgia Bulldogs, Ed Thilenius, had taken a similar job with the fledgling Atlanta Falcons. He quickly tossed his fedora into the ring, and Georgia athletic director Joel Eaves lost little time in naming Munson to take over the responsibility of keeping the denizens of Bulldogdom informed of their team's gridiron fortunes each fall.

For the Bulldog faithful, it was not exactly a case of love at first listen. Not only was the dignified, golden-throated, and infinitely more precise Thilenius quite popular, but this was 1966, and the civil rights movement remained a sore spot with many white southerners who somehow still blamed the whole business on Yankee meddling. To put it mildly, it was painfully apparent from what Georgians referred to as Munson's "brogue" that he wasn't from around here. At the outset, Larry's demeanor in the booth seemed almost modeled on the detached, button-downed style of Thilenius, but thankfully, his years in Nashville, and especially his time as Vanderbilt's broadcaster, had effectively acculturated him in some very important respects. Not the least of these was that he now understood that, far more so than anywhere else, being a college football fan in the South meant not only loving your team but hating someone else's. (The same trait, as manifested toward individual drivers is characteristic of hard-core NASCAR fans as well.) Larry acquired not just an appreciation for this feeling but the actual feeling itself during all those agonizing hours he spent giving a small long-suffering cadre of folks who actually gave a damn about Vanderbilt football a sense of how badly their beloved Commodores were getting pounded game after game, with the most painful beatings coming at the hands of a certain other Tennessee aggregation whose howling, taunting yokel fan base bedecked themselves from head to toe in traffic cone orange. 

 Thus it was that on the evening of November 3, 1973, Larry Munson made his bones as both a Georgia Bulldog and his debut as a southerner with a breathless, exultant account of Georgia's upset win over the despised Vols, topped off with "My God, Georgia has just beaten Tennessee in Knoxville!!!!" From that point on, Munson recalled, "I started hearing some things from folks. . . . I didn't plan any of that stuff. It just came out. I was just calling what I saw and what I felt." Of course, it was not what Larry actually saw but what he so clearly and unapologetically felt for their Bulldogs that won him the hearts of the Georgia fans, and win them he most assuredly did. No Georgia fan worth his salt is without at least a tape, CD, or DVD of Munson's great calls, which, of course, are all over the internet as well.  Truth be told, of course, any true Bulldog knows these calls by heart and is absolutely convinced his (and even her) imitation of Munson is absolutely spot-on. Larry probably signed as many autographs in Georgia as Herschel Walker, many of whose spectacular runs he felt required no more description than "There goes Herschel! There goes Herschel!" A reliable eyewitness account even has him being asked to lay his hands on the very pregnant belly of a sure-enough Georgia gal who wanted Larry to bless her little Bulldog-in-process.

 It's fair to say that even in his prime Munson was far from the most precise and accurate play-by-play man in college football, but he was definitely your guy if you wanted somebody to make you feel that you were sitting in the stadium, so deeply committed that a Georgia loss made suicide the only reasonable option and every bit as much a part of what was happening on the field as any tackle or tight end. I doubt that Larry got many invitations to speak at pep rallies because his ingrained, highly evolved--and to me, utterly endearing--pessimism would've turned them into wakes. It was hard for him to envision Georgia beating, for example, a team whose offensive line outweighed our defensive guys by a good eighteen ounces per man, and woe be unto our fortunes if he saw their backup punter booming them fifty yards during warm-ups. It was as if, having conditioned himself and his listeners to expect the worst, Larry gave himself--and us--reason to get really worked up if the worst was somehow averted. It was never easy though. Even in a rare runaway, listening to Munson made you think that when the game was over, you might need a whirlpool just as much as the players did. His agitated depictions of opponents' stadia "roaring against Georgia, trying to make us drop it" made it easy to imagine the field itself actually tilted against the Bulldogs, forcing them to claw their way up a steep incline like the heroic rangers scaling Point du Huc on D-day. If some of the genius of Munson's appeal as a sportscaster was learned, some of it just plain came naturally, for he was every bit as gifted a storyteller as any southerner born and bred. If you doubt this, give a listen to this account of a calamitous bird hunting trip with his father-in-law.  This is why my mama always said that she'd rather listen to Munson than watch the game on television, because envisioning the word pictures he painted with such skill and passion gave her a much more satisfying sense of what was going on. (As a side note here, one wonders whether the southern penchant for storytelling helps to explain why so many legendary sportscasters--Red Barber, Mel Allen, Lindsey Nelson, Ernie Harwell, Keith Jackson, to name but a few--hailed from below the Mason-Dixon line.)

 Here it might be noted that fans' love affairs with their team's radio guy are pretty much a thing of the past now, but believe it or not, all of you young scamps out there, there actually was a time when there was only one football game available on TV each Saturday. That's not one per channel, but one per weekend, and unless your team was Notre Dame or Southern Cal or maybe Alabama, the chances that you could catch them on the tube even once a season were none too good. If you didn't have the price of the ticket or lived a far piece away, it was you and the Philco and Munson ("Hunker Down!") or his contemporaries such as John Ward at Tennessee ("Give Him Six!") or Jack Cristil at Mississippi State ("Wrap It in Maroon and White!")

One of the great things about Munson was a truly distinctive raspy growl that made it next to impossible to miss him as you inched across the dial. Your body and possessions might be in faraway, frozen Iowa, as mine once were, but your mind and emotions were focused entirely on Lexington, Kentucky, where, according to the last snippet you could tease out of all the crackling and popping on your AM dial, the "Dogs were trailing 16-14 late in the game but driving." As you agonize about the outcome, the static suddenly, magically subside, and you hear Munson rasping, "He kicks it up, it looks good. Watch it! Watch it! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! He kicked the whatchamacallit out of it!" and you know that with absolutely every scintilla of help that Larry could provide, Georgia's great placekicker Rex Robinson has gotten it done one more time. As for ol' Munson, well, once again, he hasn't simply told you about the game, he's put you there.

Larry took a good deal of flak for being a "homer," although a lot of it seemed to come from folks whose teams had a habit of losing to Georgia back in those days. As for me, I thought it was great to have an announcer who seemed every bit as fanatical and over-the-top about my team as I was. Larry demonstrated this profound attachment vividly when, in the wake of a major scandal involving a remedial studies program catering a little too much to the football team, the University of Georgia announced that its admission criteria for athletes were going to be toughened up some. This news threw Munson into such a tizzy that he went about warning booster clubs, without the slightest hint of irony, that if the faculty had their way, Georgia would soon be on the same level as Vanderbilt. Understandably, this behavior didn't sit too well with a UGA administration charged with instituting damage control on the school's academic reputation. On the other hand, it surely demonstrated that Munson's priorities were indisputably southern even if his accent wasn't.  We're going to miss you, Larry, even though we know that, from now on,  you'll be hunkering down in a place that's even better than Sanford Stadium.

            If allegations of sexual molestation of young boys by a former assistant football coach at Penn State prove to be valid, then the outrage that these charges have sparked is entirely justified. From the horror of the acts themselves to the refusal of those in authority on campus to confront or acknowledge them, the whole business is simply pluperfect awful in every respect. Although the Ol' Bloviator sees no point in adding to the din of breast-beating and pontification with further sermonizing to the choir on this human and moral tragedy, he is not averse, however, to taking to the pulpit on another aspect of this story that happens to intersect one of his most prickly personal peeves (Try saying that fast three times without your Fixodent, why don't you?), i.e., such utterly absurd and characteristically delusional baby-boomerish contentions as "sixty is the new thirty." In other words, now that we--the one-time zealots of the Cult of Youth--are the ones getting old, age suddenly doesn't matter. Here then is the text of today's harangue: At a few days shy of 85, Joe Paterno has been too damn old for his job for a long time and so, for that matter, have the three members of the U.S. Senate who, at threescore and seven, are two years his senior.

Who is the OB to so boldly declare that the superannuation of these individuals is incompatible with the responsibilities of their respective positions? He would be a 64.5-year-old college professor who knows that if he weren't working much more intently on his teaching than he did twenty years ago, he would live in constant fear of short-changing his students and embarrassing himself. Oh, yes, he knows that you may have heard that his recent explication of the significance of the Treaty of Versailles was damn-near brilliant, and he is certainly not inclined to dispute that appraisal. He would, however, proffer the little tidbit that while said discourse may have truly been just as stellar as it was when first delivered thirty-nine years ago, it now stands as the product of considerably more preparation than it required in those now-hazy days of his youth. His apologies, doubtless insufficient, to Toby Keith, but the OB is confident that he's every bit as good for a seventy-five-minute lecture as he once was, so long as he is willing to spend a lot more time composing it than he once did.

William Ian Miller's essay "Losing IT: The Lament of an Aging Professor" is a tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the OB. As someone who once complained of "dead wood" in his department, Miller confesses that younger colleagues now seem to regard him as "petrified wood" when he tries desperately to persuade them of his continuing viability and succeeds only in "boring them silly." The OB refuses to admit that he's this far gone yet, but he cannot deny that he's working his fanny off in order to keep from becoming this guy. Nor can he deny that it isn't as long as it has been until the day arrives when working his fanny off simply won't guarantee that he can still get the job done. When that day comes, he prays that he will have the gumption to recognize it before anybody else does and head for the exit before he needs either prompting or assistance.

            Meanwhile, the gritty and grizzled Joe Pa has got twenty-one years on the OB. Moreover, whatever anyone thinks of the merits of his position and celebrity status,  because of them his actions stand to have a more direct and immediate impact on a lot more people than the OB's do.  The OB thinks Paterno's muted and almost minimalist response to the report of an alleged molestation (and perhaps to warning signals about earlier ones) by one of his associates may be in large part a reflection of his generational background. For most of Joe Pa's sixty-one-year coaching career, hushed-up accusations of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests obviously counted for less than the standing and ostensible mission of the Church itself. Likewise, Paterno's athletic generation was also one in which shower-room groping of a young boy or two would almost surely be deemed less consequential than damaging the reputation of the school or its athletic program or of the coaching fraternity in general. Take a gander at what sportswriter Michael Weinraub has to say about growing up in State College, Pa., where Joe Pa's hegemony was absolute: "Joe Paterno was our benevolent dictator, and nothing truly bad ever happened, and even when it did, it was easier just to blot it from our lives and move on. . . . Sometimes we were guilty of regarding him as more deity than man, as if he presided over us in mythological stand-up form. He was as much our own conscience as he was a football coach, and we made that pact and imbued him with that sort of power because we believed he would wield it more responsibly than any of us ever could. Maybe that was naïve, but we came of age in a place known as Happy Valley and naïveté was part of the package. . . ."

            Such deference is a powerful temptation to arrogance, which, left unchecked or even unchallenged, can lead to its own brand of naiveté. Hence we have Wednesday's announcement by Paterno that he would be stepping down as Penn State's head coach "effective at the end of the season," and therefore the school's Board of Trustees "should not spend a single minute discussing my status." This statement was not a plea or even a suggestion. It was a directive--from someone so uncomprehending of the times we live in as to imagine that his status as a campus and college football icon afforded him the privilege of dictating the terms of his own departure despite revelations of his apparent role as an enabler (and arguably, even an unwitting abettor) of an alleged serial child molester operating right under his prodigious nose. 

There is surely no guarantee that things would have turned out otherwise with a younger person in Paterno's position. Still, it seems altogether reasonable to suspect that someone of equivalent moral values but born since the Coolidge administration might have been more attuned to the dramatically heightened and pervasive sensitivity to the sexual abuse of children that has marked American life over the last generation. Would not such a person therefore have been more likely to appreciate the gravity of the situation and the disastrous consequences of failing to bring an immediate end to such horrific treatment of helpless children under the reprehensible guise of legitimacy afforded by the Penn State Athletic Department? As he teeters on the brink of senior citizenship himself, the OB salutes efforts to maximize an elderly person's sense of fulfillment and worth, but it's another thing entirely to put other people's health and safety in jeopardy just so an uber-egotistical old geezer can maintain his self-indulgent pursuit of immortality, be it in the coaching box or the halls of Congress.

When the legend-deity Paul "Bear" Bryant died in January 1983, shortly after resigning as head coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, members of the arch-rival Auburn fan base had reason to  hope that the end of  their perennial frustration with losing to the lads from Tuscaloosa might finally be a in sight.  Sure enough, in the very next matchup between the two teams, leading by three points with time running out, Auburn stood on the brink of making that hope a reality when War Eagles coach Pat Dye, faced with the choice of punting or going for it on fourth down, cast his gaze to the heavens and asked for God's guidance in making his decision. "Go for it, my son!" the Lord thundered without hesitation, "Go for it!" Naturally, Dye did as advised only to look on in total flabbergastion as the Tide easily stuffed the play, took away the ball on downs, marched down the field for a touchdown and won the game. As he staggered back to the locker room, a tearful Dye cried out in anguish, "Lord, why in the world did you tell me to go for on it on fourth down?" After a pregnant pause, the Almighty responded, "Beats me, Son. Bear, why did we tell him to do that?"

Pre- and post- game prayers have long been associated with America's most violent big-time college sport, but in recent years as the sleazier and more corrupt aspects of major college football have become increasingly apparent, it seems to the Ol' Bloviator there has been a corresponding increase in the number of coaches who go out of the way to invoke the Almighty at every opportunity. Sure enough, in a national television interview in the wake of a rare victory for the Georgia Bulldogs over the Florida Gators (who have positively dominated them over the last twenty years or so) Georgia coach Mark Richt prefaced his response to a reporter's first question with "To God be the glory. I'm so thankful. . . ." Well, the Ol' Bloviator reckons that if God had something to do with the Bulldogs beating the hated Gators for only the fourth time in the last fifteen years, then it was clearly as big a night to howl up in Heaven as it was here in good ol' Athens town. Now don't be gettin' the OB wrong. He's not questioning the sincerity of Mark Richt's remarks or anybody else's, for that matter. He is, however, a bit unsure, regardless of whether they come from the coach at Georgia, Clemson, Ole Miss, or East Cayuga Community College, whether such gestures actually glorify God or trivialize him. For example, does a statement like Richt's imply that God actually dedicated some of his energies to shaping the outcome of an encounter that, despite its overweening importance to a couple hundred thousand fanatics in these parts, amounts to not a heck of a lot compared to all the truly critical life-and-death concerns affecting millions of people crying out for His attention around the world?

As most Georgia fans see things, of course, it would be entirely appropriate for God to prefer the infinitely more-endearing "woof-woofers" of the Bulldog Nation to the "jorted" [i.e., jeans-shorted], mullet-coiffed denizens of Gatordom even though this would run somewhat contrary to His numerous professions of special concern for the suffering of the truly pathetic. Moreover, if He likes Georgia or our coach so much, where has He been for eight of the last eleven years? Regardless of how they are intended, don't attempts to link God to a triumph in any human conflict, be it mundane or monumental, amount at some level to a reiteration of the old Austin Lounge Lizards famed ditty, "Jesus Loves Me, But He Can't Stand You"?

Mark Twain's satirical skepticism, I dare say cynicism, was never on more brilliant display than in his famed "War Prayer," where the supplicant of a warring nation implores the Almighty to "help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells . . . to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain . . . to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire . . . to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief . . . to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst . . . broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it--for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts."

Okay, this might be a little over the top for what most Bulldog fans would like to see happen to the Gator hordes, although just how far over, the OB dares not say. Nor is he trying to imply that God does not intervene in human conflicts. It would be hard to imagine that He could have taken much of a shine to Hitler, for example, although if the outcome of World War II is in any sense a reflection of His intervention, He certainly took his own sweet time in getting involved.

            Much as we would like to make it an allegory about good versus evil, heretical as this may sound, a football game is really just a football game. I doubt that anyone has trouble understanding why coaches or players would ask God to help them perform at their best when it's time to take the field, but, barring the intervention of Satan's co-conspirators wearing the striped shirts, the actual outcome of the contest itself has a lot less to do with the Almighty's preference for one coach or squad over the other than the simple matter of whose "best" was better on that particular day. Finally, if, after all, the idea of a winning coach crediting God for his team's success is simply to show appropriate reverence for His power, the OB thinks it only fair that the losing coach should also have the option of blaming The Man Upstairs for his team's failure to make a single first down in the second half.

Living long enough means we all are likely to relive situations with our children that our parents experienced with us. The first-ever visit to Athens, Georgia, of one Barrett Callaway Cobb, aged seventeen months and rarin' to go, brought this home to Grandma and Grandpa Bloviator more than once last week. Since Ms. OB and I spent a good chunk of our marriage living quite a ways from our somewhat-older parents who had no other offspring or grand-offspring on whom to dote, we put in our share of twelve- to twenty-hour drives at Christmas and during the summer every year so that our folks could grab a few precious days of exposure to their grandson.

Since our parents lived in opposite corners of Georgia and we obviously couldn't visit one family and not the other, this meant extended periods of living out of suitcases and sooner or later becoming frustrated with life under the unrelenting and sometimes disapproving gaze of our folks. There were also inevitable disputes about appropriate parenting techniques and ineffectual complaints that our parents, in their zeal to shower as much unqualified affection on their pride and joy as possible in the short time allotted them, were going to spoil him rotten and undo our strenuous efforts to ameliorate some of his less appealing habits.

 As the close of each visit drew nigh, our parents would begin to bemoan the fact that they had so little time left with us, meaning, of course, with him. This practice always made us feel uncomfortable and not a little guilty, because at that point we would be getting more than a little antsy to get back to our own world where we were the ranking adults and thus under no obligation to explain or defend the way we were raising our child. Ms. OB recalls that when the countdown for departure finally began, "loading the car was always the hardest part" because the symbolism of the open trunk was unmistakable. To their credit, our folks made a gallant attempt to hold back their emotions, but their tear ducts invariably let them down. It was hard for us as twenty- and thirty-somethings to understand why it always had to be this way, why our folks had to act as if this were the very last time that the three of us would ever see them again.

During last week's visit, we made a point to take Barrett to all of his then-toddler dad's old haunts in an attempt to replicate faded photos of his father's antics in those spots. This included a trip to the famous Varsity, where we had traditionally enjoyed a chili dog and some rings for our Christmas lunch, as we bade farewell to the grandparents in Southwest Georgia to make our eagerly awaited arrival in the opposite corner of the state. These new snapshots joyously affirmed the stunning resemblance between Barrett and his dad at that age, but they also took our hearts in another direction as well, for there was simply no comprehending what had possibly happened to the thirty-eight years that had flown by since we had stood at these very same spots and tried to get Barrett's dad to smile and look into the camera. Such contemplations seem irresistible on these occasions even though you know they're as likely to bring tears as a smile as you ask yourself why you didn't recognize at the time how truly priceless those moments were. (If you had, of course, your emotions might have robbed you and everyone else of the pure enjoyment that made the instance so memorable to begin with.)  In the end, I suppose, there is at least some solace in having the opportunity to cherish those occasions retrospectively with your children while vowing never to despoil any of the finite number of such chances that lie ahead with quarreling about things that really don't matter.

Sure enough, in true grandparental fashion, as the final hours of last week's visit wound down, Ms. OB and I found ourselves moaning about how awful it would be when they were gone, and the pathetically desperate OB was bribing Barrett to get in his lap by allowing him to have his way with his Blackberry (Sorry if he called you!) and his iPad. If the OB owned a Rolex that would surely have been Barrett's to paw and pound as well. Finally, when the car was loaded and everybody strapped in, the oldsters did their best, almost succeeding in keeping their lips tight and eyes dry, while truly realizing and understanding for the first time how our own folks surely felt all those times when it was Barrett's dad waving from the car seat as we headed down their driveway. At the same time, of course, his proud new papa was getting his first sense of how his own parents had struggled to handle the awkwardness and regret that such departures invariably brought.

A friend of ours suggested that the appropriate term for what grandparents are feeling as the vehicle fades from view might be "the sweet lonesome." This rings true for us, I think, for the combination of emotional closeness and physical separation means that the tenderest moments of togetherness are more likely elicit both joy and sadness in equal and almost inseparable measure. Such partings are really no fun for any of the adult principals (although Barrett had a heckuva time demonstrating his new-found prowess at blowing kisses), but they surely exact the heaviest toll on those who no longer see the future stretching limitless and rich with many such opportunities to reaffirm our affections. Skype is a lot better than nothing, but I'd be willing to bet that most distance-challenged grandparents would gladly trade a month's worth of internet exchanges for one really good hug. 

In the meantime, the gaping void between those precious hugs is far better filled by savoring the joys of the present than inviting the inevitable sadness attendant to trying to relive a cherished past that may not be dead but can neither be resurrected or reconstituted. The shrinks of several centuries ago were not that far off when they characterized nostalgia as a seriously debilitating and potentially destructive mental/emotional disorder, offering yet another reason why all grandparents-at-a-distance should be eligible for hazardous-duty pay.

Folks, have you just plain had it with the Jehovah's Witnesses showing up every weekend to bombard  you with pamphlets and hose you down with arcane scriptural harangues? Tired of kids selling magazine subscriptions to earn a scholarship to embalming school? Is your pantry already stuffed with boxes of Girl Scout cookies with expiration dates stretching back to the Clinton Administration? If you answered "Yes" to any of the above, then, courtesy of that great southern principle of "making do with what you have," here is a truly one-of-a-kind deterrent doorbell. Install this baby, brought to my attention by a sociologist buddy of mine, and you can be pretty well assured that when you hear that ding-dong, it's somebody who really needs to see you pretty badly. That is unless, of course, it's just one of your fellow hunting fanatics.

As a matter of fact, this deer-butt doorbell reminded me immediately of one of my favorite characters, Henry Shipes, an obsessive turkey hunter in Errol Morris's "Vernon, Florida," (1981) who documents his biggest kills by nailing the slain bird's feet to a piece of plywood. In this scene, our fearless frontiersman explains how hearing the gobble of a big ol' Tom cured his diarrhea on the spot. Where Henry is simply straight-out funny, this clip  of Koy Brock, a local preacher who devotes an entire sermon to the etymology of the word "therefore" manages both to make you laugh and then to feel a little bit ashamed for doing so. (If you're a southerner anywhere close to my age and spent much time in church during your youth, I'm betting this will have a very familiar ring.)

The actual background to the making of this film is about as comical as the film itself, because Morris intended originally to focus on the mysterious propensity of the residents of this little Panhandle town to lose one or more of their extremities:

L. W. Burdeshaw, an insurance agent in [nearby] Chipley, told the St. Petersburg Times in 1982 that his list of policyholders included the following: a man who sawed off his left hand at work, a man who shot off his foot while protecting chickens, a man who lost his hand while trying to shoot a hawk, a man who somehow lost two limbs in an accident involving a rifle and a tractor, and a man who bought a policy and then, less than twelve hours later, shot off his foot while aiming at a squirrel.

"There was another man who took out insurance with 28 or 38 companies," said Murray Armstrong, an insurance official for Liberty National. "He was a farmer and ordinarily drove around the farm in his stick-shift pickup. This day--the day of the accident--he drove his wife's automatic transmission car, and he lost his left foot. If he'd been driving his pickup, he'd have had to use that foot for the clutch. He also had a tourniquet in his pocket.

"We asked why he had it and he said, 'Snakes. In case of snake bite.' He'd taken out so much insurance, he was paying premiums that cost more than his income. He wasn't poor, either. Middle class. He collected more than $1 million from all the companies. It was hard to make a jury believe a man would shoot off his foot."

Nearly fifty men in Vernon and surrounding areas collected insurance for these so-called accidents.

Filmmaker Morris had come to town intending to tell the story behind Vernon's well-deserved reputation as "Nub City," but locals let him know right away that pursuing this plan might lead to his sporting a nub or two himself, and he wound up retooling the film as something of a collage featuring the community's most eccentric and colorful characters who seemed to exist in comparable profusion to its host of profiteering self-mutilators.

One of William Faulkner's characters observes that northerners seem "eager to believe anything about the South not even provided it be derogatory but merely bizarre enough and strange enough." Some of the more devoutly Dixie-fied still find it almost obligatory to take umbrage at the persistent tendency among Yankee media types to come down in search of folks who affirm this predisposition. I guess I'm just too old and tired to have the appropriate regionally patriotic sensitivity to whatever intended slights may be behind these efforts to seek out such characters, but you have to admit some of the folks they turn up are just plain hilarious, and the mere fact that Yankees are laughing at them doesn't mean we can't as well.

This certainly appears to be the case with this "Colbert Report" take on a story originating  right here in these parts that ultimately went viral and even found its rehashed way into no less a rag than the New York Times. If you haven't seen this video, it's well worth enduring the fifteen-second commercial,  for it's sort of a classic example of the old Brer Rabbit genre in which the designated southern simpleton is actually pulling the strings so deftly that the presumptuous city slickers have not a clue that it is they who are actually being "funned" just a little. Local reporter Wayne Ford is so incredibly adept at deadpan that the videographers probably had no notion he was simply playing along. The real find in the story is actually Chris Cooley, who proves to be not just wild and woolly but ultimately wise. Note his scarcely constrained incredulity when he is asked simpleminded questions such as why he runs when the police swoop down on him: "because the police want to take me to jail, and I don't want to go," or why he refused to lie on the ground when ordered to do so: "I was sweaty, it was hot, I didn't want to get dirt on me." Note also Cooley's absolute refusal to cast himself as a persecuted, misunderstood man of the people. He notes that because he is perhaps Oconee County, Georgia's most notorious and least credible scofflaw, any offense committed by a person unknown usually means that he is arrested "whether I'm guilty or not," but he is admirably quick to add, "Mostly, I'm guilty."

Meanwhile, the supposed central character in this rustic farce is one Bobby Kirk , who has become something of a backwoods savant-turned-folk hero for his vivid capture of the summer's hellish temperatures with the succinct observation, "It's too hot to fish!" What most of the Yankee reporters who came to Bogart, Georgia, in search of Bobby (after first, of course, being in search of Bogart, Georgia) failed to grasp was that Bobby was a self-conscious caricature of himself. Although the response would likely not have been worded thus, any local asked to characterize ol' Bob could've told them this.

This exchange with an NYT reporter is particularly telling:

Does it bother him that he is getting famous in part because people might be making fun of him? . . .

"No," he said. "They can make a monkey out of me as long as I get some money."

The Times scribe marks this as the response of "a savvy country boy," but it is hard to see what's particularly "country," i.e., "southern" about it. It actually defines the apparent philosophy of a bunch of hyper-profligate "housewives" from Jersey to California, not to mention repo men, antique-hunters, and a huge assortment of others, who have come to believe that even bad publicity is good for the pocketbook. Professor Karen Cox of UNC-Charlotte has a thoughtful take  on the rapid proliferation of "reality TV" shows such as "Hillbilly Handfishin'" and "Swamp People" as an indication that the national mass market for southern stereotypes is still going strong, primarily because they reassure other Americans of their own relative enlightenment and sophistication.

Southerners have been hip to this for well over a century, of course, and have long understood that no pocket is riper for the picking that that of a Yankee who has just had his superiority reaffirmed. If a high-powered, big-budgeted New York or L.A. producer is just dying to document the survival of the supposedly backward South, then why not oblige him and demonstrate thereby that the region's longstanding reputation for hospitality (especially to well-heeled suckers) remains very much alive. While there are very sound reasons to object to these seemingly demeaning and obviously caricatured portrayals of southerners, there's no shame in the fact that southerners can be very funny people or that they enjoy laughing at each other almost as much as making fun of the outsiders who are actually paying for the privilege of making fun of them.

Although all of us are prone to make chronological mileposts of particularly striking or traumatic events, understandably perhaps, historians are clearly more given to this practice than most. Both shaken and consumed by what happened on the morning of September 11, 2001,  I tried to sort out my feelings in the following piece that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the next day.

"Americans Left to Fear Unseen Enemy"
          On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promised to forge "a world founded upon four essential freedoms." In addition to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from want, there was "freedom from fear," which in Roosevelt's view meant "a worldwide reduction of armaments" so that "no nation will be in a position to commit an act of aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world." Rather than securing freedom from fear, however, our victory in World War II soon dissolved into a nuclear arms race fueled by the Cold War.
          The generation that spent portions of their childhoods practicing for direct nuclear hits on their elementary schools by putting their heads under their desks or had its adolescence punctuated by the sheer terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis can hardly look back with much nostalgia on that era. Yet, even as the Cold War ended and we breathed a collective sigh of relief at the diminished likelihood of a global nuclear holocaust, we were already slipping into a new era of fear and uncertainty, one in which the enemy could be internal, as well as external, and essentially invisible to boot, one in which extravagant defense budgets and massive missile stockpiles count for less than the ruthless and calculated fanaticism of relatively small numbers of unseen and often unknown enemies....

          The hysterical reporters and the scenes of genuine public panic in New York City seemed more the stuff of B-movies or a TV mini-series than that of live "as-we-speak" reality. Obviously, we are stunned by the apparent ease with which planes at major airports could be hijacked and used to demolish what should have been a tightly secured potential terrorist target. Yet, neither our shock or our dismay at the paralyzing fallout of this atrocity at all the nation's airports and in its major cities defines the true significance of yesterday's horrors. That significance lies in the capacity of an unseen enemy to make not just the residents of New York or Washington, D.C., afraid, but to implant that fear into the hearts of millions of Americans who have never been (and probably never intend to be) anywhere near either place.

          This reality came through to me in a number of ways, including the cancellation of classes at the University of Georgia and the anxious investigation of a "suspicious" van parked near the federal building in Athens. However, it was local reaction to yesterday's horrors here in rural Hart County that I found most enlightening. Our local radio station, WKLY, "The Voice of the Upper Savannah River," largely suspended its regular programming (save, of course, for the obituaries and mid-day devotional) and broadcast the programming of the Georgia News Network. The mayor of Hartwell, a woman of Lebanese extraction and the Episcopal faith, urged citizens to offer their prayers for the victims and their families "in their own tradition." To that end, churches in town and throughout the county opened their doors to the prayerful. Yet, for all the sincere expressions of grief and compassion for the victims and their families that were uttered in Hart County yesterday, I feel certain that explicitly or not, those prayers also embodied a personal plea for the freedom from fear that, despite our victories in World War II and the Cold War, seems more elusive now than it did when President Roosevelt pledged to secure it for us it sixty years ago.

Ten years later, there are still some what I would call "suspicious" vans chugging about old Athens town, but, of course, there always have been, at least since I arrived here as a student in the mid-1960s.  Meanwhile, Americans seem less fearful of terrorists than what appears now  to be a protracted, possibly even two-tiered,  economic downturn that has put many of them out of both their jobs and their homes. This frightening and frustrating state of affairs is further compounded by our continuing involvement in two massively expensive military operations, both of which were justified as necessary to prevent a recurrence of the events of 9/11/01. It remains to be seen whether, if and when we are able to extricate ourselves from either of these conflicts, we will have succeeded in doing much more than provoking further resentments that are likely to spawn a new generation of bin Ladens.

Certainly, the striking unity of purpose and resolve that marked America's response to what happened on that terrible Tuesday ten years ago is little in evidence these days. Unfortunately, when the overwhelming majority of members of both parties rallied behind President Bush in a time of genuine national alarm, his political strategists could not resist the temptation to exploit that alarm by making it the foundation for an orchestrated climate of fear in which criticizing any of his policies became tantamount to aiding and abetting the terrorists who were committed to destroying our way of life. Thus it was that on the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, I tore into "W." for "shameless fear mongering" when he used the solemn occasion of a visit to Ground Zero to promote wholesale acceptance of his political agenda by warning us yet again that "there's still an enemy out there that would like to inflict the same kind of damage again." I hardly marked myself as a representative of the liberal lunatic fringe by pointing out that the President was telling us that because we were essentially "no freer from fear than we were five years ago," we must continue to support the policies that had thus far failed to achieve that end. At the same time, the notorious pinkos at The Economist were also scoffing at "the idea that it is the West and its values that are everywhere under attack, and everywhere by the same seamless front of what Mr. Bush has taken to calling 'Islamic fascism' as if this conflict is akin to the second world war or the cold war against communism."

Two years later, it was painfully obvious that objections to the Bush administration's strategy of tarring their critics with the brush of disloyalty had fallen on what by then may have been willfully unhearing ears. The accusations and innuendo that greeted the candidacy of Bush's successor both fed and foreshadowed the polarization that has now crippled our capacity to fashion any constructive response to an economic crisis arguably more frightening in its destructive potential than anything that transpired on that terrible morning ten years ago. Indeed, freedom from "fear" and the freedom from "want" no longer fit neatly into the distinct categories laid out by FDR in 1941 As things stand today, it's not terribly far-fetched to suggest that the fallout from the politically motivated manipulation of the anxieties produced by the atrocities of September 11, 2001, may well prove far more damaging to our country's well being than the actual events themselves.