If Ole Miss debate gets cancelled, pick up a good Mississippi book

Put aside the fact that presidential debates these days aren't much more than exchanges of policy statements. It's still a good thing to see your candidate matched up against the other. This time, we may get excellent speaker and debater Barack Obama matched up with a chair. It's possible that the chair may be more animated than John McCain.

McCain is busy, you see, screwing things up in D.C. And he's not even president! As soon as McCain flew into negotiations about the big bailout, those negotiations fell apart. If this is how he handles this crisis, what would he do as Commander-in-Chief?

So what about the debate? I've been checking out several of the fine Mississippi progressive blogs and they have no definitive answer. But they do provide some great reading and a lot of info on local and state politics. Check out Cotton Mouth and the Natchez blog. The Natchez bloggers were on the scene at the DNC in Denver and seemed to be right on top of things.

As you probably know, the debate is supposed to be held in Oxford, site of University of Mississippi or "Ole Miss" as its alumni and fans refer to it. Oxford also home for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. On the web, you can locate info about your favorite Miss. writer at The Mississippi Writers Page. The lists are a who's who of the country's best writers in the past century: William Faulkner (in photo, looking upon the proceedings with jaundiced eye), Eudora Welty, Barry Hannah, Nevada Barr, Richard Wright, Larry Brown, Richard Ford, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Spencer, Beth Henley, Lewis Nordan, Etheridge Knight, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, John Grisham and Brad Watson (currently teaching writing at University of Wyoming).

So, if the debate is postponed or cancelled, I suggest you hunker down with a good book by one of these writers. You'll learn more about humankind on those pages than you would at any political function.

Photo: From the Cofield Collection