A (belated) Christmas memory, Colorado and Capote

"The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere

Is a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow."

That's the refrain in "Colorado Christmas" by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a song written by Steve Goodman. I listened to it numerous times during the Christmas season and call it up other times. It's pure nostalgia, a musician in a L.A. hotel dreaming about "Telluride and Boulder Down below." No mention of Denver, my hometown, or Aurora, where I did some of my growing up, or Fort Collins, where I attended grad school. Telluride is a wonder, deep in the Rockies, well known for skiing and summer music festivals. Something beautiful about sitting on a grassy field under the stars listening to music. Boulder, of course, is known coast-to-coast for its counterculture vibe, beatniks and hippies, Naropa Institute, the CU cafeteria named for a Colorado cannibal, "South Park," and the Flatirons jutting up to the west like, well, flatirons. John Fante grew up in Boulder. You can get heated up about your favorite cause and then cool off at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court on the CU campus.

So, is NGDB from Colorado? They are in the Colorado Music Hall of Fame and many in its roster of performers live in Colorado. Long-time member Jimmy Ibbotson had a recording studio in Woody Creek outside Aspen, also known as the lair of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

I first heard "Colorado Christmas" in Aspen. Christine and I were up in Starwood, heading to our friend Steve's father's house, when we got stuck in a snowbank. We drove an AMC/Renault compact, not even front-wheel drive. Driving up the night before, we got lost and stopped at an intersection where a big 4WD was parked. Obviously lost, we waved, the window rolled down, and John Denver poked out his head. Yes, he said, this is the right road to Starwood. We thanked him and didn't even ask him for a song. We maneuvered up the scary road to the summit. Two hours later we drove down. The next morning, we drove back up and got stuck. As we did the usual rock-and-roll motion to free the car, "Colorado Christmas" came on the radio. I thought it was the most beautiful song I ever heard even though at that very moment we were stuck on a quiet Christmas morning in the Colorado snow. "The closest thing to heaven on this planet anywhere..." What could we do? We laughed, and kept on rollin'.

We live in Florida now.

Speaking of Christmas memories --

"A Christmas Memory" was a 1966 Emmy-winning televised story by Truman Capote. A remake appeared later but it lacked what made the earlier one stand out, narrator Capote. So special to hear his voice recall a rural Alabama childhood memory. A young Capote (Buddy in the story) is deserted by his parents and stays with his grown-up second cousin Sook whose goal for the season is to make 30 fruitcakes for friends and neighbors. She is dirt-poor in the midst of the Great Depression and she and Buddy scrape together what they have saved during the year and set out on their quest. First stop: salvage "windfall pecans" from Farmer Callahan's grove. They buy makings at the general store and a bottle of bootleg whiskey from Ha Ha Jones Fish Fry and Dancing Cafe. They make the cakes and distribute them just in time for Christmas. The cakes are sweet and imply a bit of a buzz. The sweetest part is the young Capote and his grown-up voice, this tiny story that came from the writer who gave us true stories of Kansas murderers, Manhattan society dames, and tortured souls who haunt Tiffany's. Capote was a tortured soul but how he could write. 

Love in the Ruins is not just Another Roadside Attraction

I awoke thinking of Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World." I finished the 1971 novel late last night. It has a satisfying ending which I won't divulge. It's set five years after the main action of the novel. It wraps things up but I was still left with this thought: This is a satirical sci-fi novel about loss and grief. 

It struck me in the same way as the movie "Arrival." I had to watch the film a second time to understand the ending as well as the beginning and middle. I felt a bit dim that I didn't get it the first time around. The second time I wanted to cry. 

They gave Dr. Louise Banks the same gift the Tralfamadorians gave Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse Five." She became unstuck in time, gift from the Space Octopoids who came to warn Earth and seek our help for a future calamity. Dr. Banks saw her future tragedy but lived it anyway, a brave thing. 

In "Love in the Ruins," set in some future time, the 45-year-old Dr. Thomas More has already experienced tragedy in the cancer death of his young daughter followed by his wife leaving him. Oh yeah -- he also faces the end of the world. He does his best to assuage his grief and fear with scientific inventions, sex, and gin fizzes. Nothing works. "To be or not to be?" What does he decide?

Percy was the son and grandson of suicides. After a bout with TB during the World War 2 years, he became a doctor and then a mental patient at the same hospital. Percy suffered from Depression and PTSD just as war veteran Binx Bolling does in Percy's 1961 novel "The Moviegoer." 

He is well-known as the writer who helped publish John Kennedy Toole's "The Confederacy of Dunces," another award-winning New Orleans-set novel about an unhinged character. Toole, of course, committed suicide allegedly despondent when nobody would publish his novel. Suicide, I'm told, is more than a passing sorrow. It figures heavily in literature, especially Southern lit.

I almost quit reading this novel. Several times. It's wordy and Percy does a lot of showing off with language. In places, his humor is more Keystone Kops than dark satire. I did laugh out loud in spots. Dr. More keeps getting into messes he causes himself. A Buster-Keaton-kind of hero. 

I first read this novel when I was 23. I am now 74. In 1973, I saw it as a romp, the prof's great example of the dark humor of the ages. We also read Tom Robbins' 1971 kaleidoscopic novel "Another Roadside Attraction." That too was a romp with deep undercurrents and portents. Robbins was born in North Carolina and grew up there and in Virginia. He referred to himself as a hillbilly and his editor called him "a real Southern Gentleman." Both his grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers. Later on, he discovered Washington state where he wrote his books. 

I should reread Robbins' novel and see how I react 52 years on. It may mean something different to me in 2025. 

Drive-by photos of a closed Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home

 

Photos of the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Museum in Savannah (building in center). It was closed to visitors on the day we were there. Built like a brick fort, sturdy and tall. Savannah's early residents built tall so they could fire down on their enemies, whoever they might be: warriors from local tribes, the King of England's soldiers, Yankees, The Misfit, or any rabble who might storm the gates. This makes it almost impossible for this fallen-away Catholic to access the place in my e-scooter. The backyard garden might be accessible but it was closed tight on Wednesday but open Friday-Sunday. It's the meeting place for the Peacock Guild writing group. Members are critiquing and polishing their work for a June reading. As the story goes, the young O'Connor taught her chicken to walk backward in the garden. Read my 2023 blog: "In Flannery O'Connor's Garden of Life, chickens walk backward"

"Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books" brings comic relief to the book-banning hubbub

In several Wyoming communities, including Casper, Gillette, Lander and Sheridan, some members of the public have turned typically staid school board meetings into chaos by clamoring to have all LGBTQ-themed or sex-related books -- even textbooks -- pulled from shelves.--Kerry Drake, WyoFile, May 21, 2024

Add Cheyenne to the list.

Author Kirsten Miller's new novel takes its cue from the recent book-banning tide by Moms for Liberty and other right-wing groups. While whiney complainers go ballistic over books in schools and libraries that feature minority and LBGTQ characters, Miller's book provides us with some welcome comic relief.

“Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books” is a rollicking novel about this most timely of subjects. I cared for the characters – even the bad guys -- and I ploughed ahead to find out what happens to book banner Lula Dean and Little Library saboteur whose name I won’t reveal here because it was so nice to shout “Ah ha!” when that character is revealed. One of the pleasures of reading is anticipating what happens on the next page. Our protagonist finds a way to use Lula Dean’s library to get banned books into the hands of everyday people in the town.

If you have ever come across a Little Library in your neighborhood, it’s like finding a treasure. A Little Library is as quirky as the people who install these distinctive structures in their front yard and stock it with books. It might feature one topic, say astronomy or gardening or children’s literature. A little librarian who is a fiction fan might stock mysteries or cowboy romances or just a hodgepodge of novels set in 18^th century France, Mars of the future, or modern-day Manhattan.

In a county library, books are arranged just so by trained librarians. You want “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, you stroll to the fiction section and find it under M. If confused, you can look up the location on the library’s bank of computers. And, this may seem quaint and outdated, but you also can ask a librarian. They are very helpful.

In Lula Dean’s case, she is so outraged by some of the “filth” foisted on unsuspecting teen readers. ] Lula Dean stocks her library with hardcover books on wholesome subjects. Titles include “The Art of Crochet,” “Contract with America,” “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” and “Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe.” It won’t be long before a bored teen turns into a dedicated saboteur who will muck up Lula Dean’s efforts to invoke the tenets spelled out in Project 2025.

Crystal Moore is a textbook housewife until she sees her husband cheating on her with a cashier at the local Piggly Wiggly. Desperate, she goes to Lula’s library to find a way to win back her husband. She picks “The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.” Once she starts reading she discovers the book is “All Women are Witches: Find Your Power and Put it to Use.” The preacher’s daughter is shocked, at first, but starts reading and finds some helpful advice that might “keep Janelle Hopkins’ giant boobs away from my husband.” 

Well, first she wanders into the woods to pick up items for a love potion from the "Witches" book. She gets lost in the woods and unleashes a string of obscenities that might not win her Mother of the Year honors. She finds a pond, strips, and goes swimming. She dries off by the pond and is absorbed by nature. She’s still there when the sun sets and the moon rises. Next thing she knows, it’s morning and a search party is calling out her name. She returns home but life is never going to be the same for her husband and family or the town of Troy. Its residents find secret texts in Lula’s library and put them to good use.

The author, who grew up in North Carolina, sets the novel in a small community in  Georgia. Why not some little town in the Carolinas or possibly even Wyoming? Why not, indeed (see the intro quote). Georgia has featured heavily in the Christian Right’s effort to take away books from our kids and eventually (we know it’s coming) from adult readers and even crotchety old guy readers such as myself. Georgia is not all MAGA hats and smoke-belching pickups. It’s also home to liberal Atlanta with its thousands of curious readers as well as Tyler Perry’s groundbreaking movie studio. Georgia is also home to Athens which enlivened the independent music scene with R.E.M., the B-52s, and Widespread Panic. Georgia-based Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity practice the “woke” Bible with good deeds for communities across the globe.

We are reminded daily that not every burg wants to ban books. But there are too many that are. Ignoramuses with Bible in hand and a seething resentment they can’t explain serve on too many local school boards in every Wyoming county.  

This hubbub may eventually die down and readers decades from now may wonder what the fuss was about. I’m reminded of Carl Hiaasen’s book “Squeeze Me” and its predatory humans and Burmese pythons. The book’s only four years old and man what a fun ride it was. We had hoped that by this time the book’s main character, a certain human predator in South Florida, would be gone from the political stage. But he’s not. Someone should write a book about it.

Miller was inspired, finished the book in record time, and Harper Collins wasted little time in getting it into our hands. The publishing process is agonizingly slow so credit goes to Miller, her agent, proofreaders, and HC.

The big question: Do satires ever do any good? “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is now 60 years old and me and everyone else in Wyoming’s Capital City are surrounded by nuclear missiles that could wipe out humankind at the punch of a button. Know-it-alls who want to tell the rest of us what to do and what to read have always been with us. The pungent film “Idiocracy” is now seen as a documentary. The brilliant “Catch-22” and “Slaughterhouse Five” did little to stop warfare. What’s the point?

The point is that fine books such as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” have something important to tell us. People who read are more informed and more engaged citizens. Maybe that’s what Lula Dean and her crowd are afraid of.

That’s exactly what they are afraid of.

 

 

In Flannery O'Connor's Garden of Life, chickens walk backward

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the intersection of writers and gardening. I mentioned that Flannery O'Connor's Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, had gardens and peacocks. Yesterday, as I looked up writers with Savannah ties, I came across the fact that O'Connor was born and mostly raised in Savannah. Her childhood home is now site of a museum and gardens. Now I have two O'Connor-related gardens to visit next time I'm in Georgia. One of the more interesting facts on the museum's web site, was a snippet about a 6-year-old O'Connor and her trained chicken. She trained a chicken to walk backward. This apparently caught the attention of Pathe News Service and they came to Savannah to see for themselves. They filmed O'Connor and her talented chicken and it ended up in a 1931 newsreel that theater patrons would see before the cartoon and double feature. The writer sarcastically noted later that this was quite an event for her and everything that followed was an "anticlimax." The writer died of lupus at 39. Her anticlimax included some fine writing. She's influenced thousands of us with her spare style featuring "grotesques" (her term) of the South. Plenty of humor too. Not sure if any story or novel featured a backward-walking chicken. Who would believe that? The Misfit?

Sallie Kincaid finds her inner moonshiner in Jeanette Wells' "Hang the Moon"

I participate in the Historical Fiction Book Lovers site on Facebook. I have discovered some real gems set in the 1920s suggested by members of the group. A few clunkers, too. But one I did see was "Hang the Moon" by Jeanette Wells. You may recognize her name from her memoir, "The Glass Castle," in which she recounts her wild family life and her success at transcending it. I recently watched the movie on one of the streaming services. Woody Harrelson is very good as the father with a million dreams that never pan out. It leaves a mark on Wells and her siblings.

The setting of "Hang the Moon" is one reason I chose the book. I'm writing a series of novels set in post-war Colorado, the first in 1919 and the second in 1922. I read books from that era to absorb the atmosphere but also the process of driving a Ford Model T. The moonshine world of the South is fascinating and violent. Prohibition brought new opportunities for those who lived in the hills. But making whiskey was going on before 1920 due to the South's blue laws and other restrictions on getting schnockered. That tradition continued after prohibition was repealed due to the same Bible-Thumpers who proposed it in the first place. Many of the first racers on the NASCAR circuit learned how to drive avoiding revenooers on the twisty roads of the Appalachians. One of my early memories was "Thunder Road" and Robert Mitchum hotrodding down winding roads to get the hooch to market.

Wells has seen rural poverty first-hand and puts that background to good use when she writes about growing up in Prohibition America. It's a gritty historical novel. I ran into a couple of slow stretches in the narrative and thought of quitting but it was a good story so I kept on and glad I did.

In it, a young woman named Sallie Kincaid bucks the odds and becomes the only woman rumrunner in Virginia during Prohibition. Haven't read many books with this story line. It takes the author a long time to get to the rumrunning. Sallie Kincaid likes fast cars. She has a derring-do spirit. I would have liked to see more action during what must have been a harrowing profession. She takes us along the first time the drivers risk capture to take five cars filled with shine to Roanoke. An excellent chase scene. There's also a showdown at a rural hospital between the rumrunners and the thug sheriff brought in to stop it.

It took awhile to get a fully-formed picture of Sallie. Her Aunt Mattie is rough on her but we don't get a good look inside her to see her motivation. Why does Sallie stick around her large small-town family when she has other options including marriage or just moving to a new place to make a fresh start? I'm being grumpy, I know, but the book left me wanting more. Cover art shows a young woman in a dress working under a 1920s-era automobile. But the author doesn't get her under (and into) that car for a couple hundred pages. 

The novel really picks up its tempo when Sallie takes over the family businesses and finds her inner moonshiner. She's almost as ruthless as her daddy but we do see her conscience at work throughout. There are some key revelations as the novel approaches the end. It was a worthy read. I checked it out at the Libby site. I was pleasantly surprised to find it there.

Making, transporting and drinking whiskey were boys' clubs -- no girls allowed. That's what makes Sallie Kincaid so special and so exciting. Her Hatfield/McCoy-style battles with the gritty Bond brothers has a bigger impact when a mere slip of a girl threatens the status quo. She finds new and interesting ways to wage war on the Bonds. A few of them borrow tactics pioneered in the Great War. Tom, her friend who’s been to war, melts down with shell-shock when the gunplay starts.

The Great War changed everything.

Booth and the Our American Cousin we want to forget

BOOTH

That family name is infamous. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the most dastardly deeds in U.S. history. We still live with the consequences.

Booth didn't just rise from the Ford Theater stage and murder a president. He came from somewhere. He had parents, brothers and sisters. As a kid in Maryland, he was a scamp who liked dogs, rode horses, and played tricks on his siblings. He is not a monster, at least he's not in Karen Joy Fowler's amazing historical novel, "Booth." He's the third-youngest of the children of noted actor Junius Booth and his beleaguered wife. A Marylander, he turns into a Southern sympathizer and buys into the kind of political mind-rot our Uncle Jimbo in South Carolina now gets on Fox and social media. 

We know how the story ends. In tragedy, maybe the worst one in American history. An almost-famous actor kills the president and changes history.

One can almost hear the reporters of 1865 interviewing the neighbors. "He seemed like such a nice man. Last winter I saw him playing in the snow with the kids (a scene from "Booth"). A fine actor too. You just gotta wonder what went wrong."

Presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. He seemed like such a nice man. Until he wasn't.

"Booth," an historical novel by Karen Joy Fowler, explores the Booth family history leading up to April 14, 1865, at a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer and conspiracy nut, bursts into Lincoln's box and shoots him in the head. The country, part of it anyway, goes into mourning. Unreconstructed Confederates cheer. 

A divided country -- so what else is new? 

Profiles in courage: The men and women who fought for civil rights

"Did you say that President Trump wrote a book?"

The questions came from a middle-aged African-American staffer in the Martin Luther King, Jr., room at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. I had just turned away from the replica of MLK's library that lines the wall to the gallery. My collegian nephew Morgan, pushing me in a wheelchair, had spotted a book by Nixon on the library shelves. "Nixon wrote a book?" he asked.

I told him that all presidential candidates write books. They're campaign tools, a chance to outline their philosophy and goals should they rise to the highest office in the land. I pointed out a paperback copy of JFK's 1956 "Profiles in Courage." I had devoured that book in the months leading up to President Kennedy's election. I was a voracious reader at 9.

"Trump wrote a book," I replied to the question from the museum staffer."They don't always write them. Some use  ghost writers." It was an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

She seemed bemused by the concept. I was too. Trump's book, "Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again," was published in November of 2015, a year before the election that changed America for the worse. A glowering Trump adorns the cover, reflecting the ugliness that waits inside. He looks like your angry old neighbor, the same kind of person who flocks to Trump's white-power rallies.

"They just threw 200,000 people off the food stamp rolls," the staffer said as Morgan, my sister Mary and I exited.

"Can we be any more cruel?" I replied.

The answer, of course, is yes they can be more cruel. Trumpists demonstrate this every day.

We were in a museum that remembered some of the cruelest chapters in American history. The South's Jim Crow laws, lynchings, murders, sundowner ordinances, miscegenation statutes, segregation.

The exhibits remembered those outrages. And also celebrated the response of outraged Americans involved in the Civil Rights struggle. You know some of the names. Those mostly unknown faces look out from the exhibits. Freedom Riders, college students who came from all over to register black voters, priests, ministers, and rabbis who left their flocks to administer to the dispossessed and disenfranchised in the rural South. There are the murdered and the martyred. Four little girls killed when the KKK bombed a black Birmingham church. Emmett Till, tortured and killed in 1955 by redneck vigilantes for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Medgar Evers, the World War II veteran who challenged segregation at the University of Mississippi and was shot down in 1963 by a member of the White Citizens' Council.

Millions now know the names and faces of these brave people who challenged the  status quo.

The most frightening exhibit recreates the sit-ins at the Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth's. You sit on a lunch counter stool, place earphones over your head, and hands flat on the counter. For the next few minutes, you experience what those black college students went through in the name of equality. Name-calling, threats, slaps upside the head. The lunch counter stool vibrates with the kicks from racists in their jackboots. I was shaken when I stepped down. I've heard the same invective coming from 21st century racists.

On the way to the gift shop, we passed a large mural by Paula Scher that features protest posters from around the world. I really liked it so bought a few items in the shop that celebrates that work of art. Christmas is coming, after all. And I want to always remember this place. I also urge everyone I know to visit it.

Writers from the South (North, East & West) -- read them all

Status updates cycle through Facebook so quickly. A person from academia posted the other day that he was searching for justification for teaching a course on southern literature at his university. Can't find it now to respond in person but I've been thinking a lot about it and have some thoughts.

My first response is this: you study southern literature because its fun. I am a former student of Harry Crews at University of Florida and you haven't lived until you've read Feast of Snakes and Karate is a Thing of the Spirit.

Fantastic fiction writers abound: Bobbie Anne Mason, Carson McCullers, Connie May Fowler, Alice Walker, George Saunders, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Kaye Gibbons, Tim Gautreaux, William Faulkner, Lewis Nordan, Flannery O'Connor, etc. Alas, I know very few southern writers under 40. That's my loss, I'm sure. I could remedy that by reading more litmags with roots in the South: Georgia Review, Chattahoochee Review, storySouth, Carolina Quarterly, Snake Nation Review, and many others. If these mags are doing their duty, they are publishing up-and-coming writers in the South and those of us who carry the South around like a beat-up copy of a Faulkner novel.

So study southern literature. As long as you read the books. Read them all.

South Carolina's Pat Conroy wove the South and family and military traditions into his novels. I looked forward to reading a new Conroy novel. I was transfixed by "The Prince of Tides." Southern angst, crazy families, suicide, escaped convicts, tiger attacks -- you don't get many of those in southern novels. That was a doozy of a dysfunctional family. Too bad they made a movie. We got too much of Barbra Srreisand as Susan Lowenstein and not enough of the Wingo family.

At first encounter, I wasn't all that impressed with Flannery O'Connor. Then in grad school I took a class on the short story. I started writing short stories and reading new authors to understand their secrets. I read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and realized it was a twisted tale and a work of art. It possessed some of that magic you get in a great story. O'Connor imbued her stories with the mysticism of her Catholic faith and the South, a wicked combination. Her characters vibrate with life. The Misfit's final words about the grandmother are harsh and mysterious and I still don;'t know exactly what they mean. He kills Grandma, we know that. But his motives remain mysterious. Like faith itself -- beautiful and unknowable. One thing that helped me understand her stories is reading her collected letters in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor."

That's it, isn't it? The great stories shine with a fire lit by the author. When you read Raymond Carver, you are beset with his yen for demon rum. He's not of the South but his work possesses some of those elements. Nebraska's Willa Cather seems to have dragged Southern Gothic elements over the prairie from her Virginia birthplace.

Read them all.

Hurricane Matthew, "Our Town," and Florida memories

Over my second cup of coffee on this beautiful Wyoming Saturday, I wondered why I still had the Weather Channel blaring from my Smart TV.

Hurricane Matthew. Matt, to his friends, which are few after he pounded the U.S, coast and the Caribbean this past week.

I do like the drama of a hurricane compounded by the melodrama of media coverage.

It gets more real when you're there. Many family members and friends were in the path of Matthew. All are fine although much clean-up to do. My brother Tom in Palm Bay has trees down in his yard -- but not on his house.

One of my first experiences as a 13-year-old Florida resident was with Hurricane Cleo in 1964. On my first full day on Ormond Beach, the waves broke big and the current was strong. Our parents warned us kids not to go out too far or we'd be sucked out to sea. My brother Dan and I listened (sort of) and waded into the surf, keeping an eye on (sort of) our younger brothers and sisters, who were many. The sun beat down and we body-surfed, or tried to. We were from Colorado and had never been in the ocean before.

The next day, Cleo brushed the coast, leaving us inside to watch the rain fall and the wind blow around the big palms. The next day, Dan and I were back on the beach and rarely left it for the next five years. By the following summer, we were surfing. Hodads, gremmies -- wannabe surfers. We moved south to Daytona and surfed with the big boys at Hartford Avenue, a group later known as the Hartford Heavies and included my brothers Pat, Tom and Tim. Hell-raisers and good short-board surfers. They ripped the waves, ditched school for good surf.

Hurricane Dora targeted Daytona in the fall of '64. The illustration on the front of the morning paper showed a swirling storm. On its landward side, an arrow pointed right at me. Our father picked us up at Our Lady of Lourdes Grade School and whisked us off in the Ford Falcon station wagon to a motel on the mainland. Ten of us jammed into two tiny rooms. We watched the rain fall and the palms sway, listened to storm reports on the radio. Dora swerved and hit St. Augustine instead, giving us a glancing blow, a little less severe than the one Matt just delivered.

I lived in Florida for most of 14 years. Those are the only hurricanes I remember. 1964 was an active season, with three of the six named hurricanes hitting Florida. Isbell was the third, cutting across south Florida on its way to North Carolina. Cleo, Dora and Isbell were all retired from the official hurricane naming list, which featured only names of the female persuasion back then.

In the ninth grade, Father Lopez High School put on Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Our director was a woman with Broadway experience. She thought Our Town was just right for a small Catholic school with no theatre budget and no theatre but a serviceable gym. This was the minimalist version, with no stage design, except for a pair of stepladders and a few chairs. And no complicated costumes. I auditioned because I had time on my hands that fall after not making the cut for junior varsity basketball. This particularly irked me after my successful season with the OLL Falcons, runner-up in the 1965 parochial league tournament. I channeled my anger into an unforgettable role as Second Dead Man in the poignant cemetery scene. It was the closest I got to the gym floor all year.

After her funeral, the dead Emily appears at the cemetery.

EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.”

They do some. It's pleasant to think so, that poets and writers actually live life and notice it at the same time.

Maybe it helps if you're a saint.

I was dressed in an old suit and pretended to be a dead guy from Grover's Corners. The apex of my acting career. Our Town could be seen as a nostalgic look at life in a quaint New England village. What it does is rip your heart out.

I didn't know that as 15-year-old  Second Dead Man.

I do now.

Lest you deny Wilder's seriousness in this play, he often noted that it was rarely performed correctly and that it "should be performed without sentimentality or ponderousness--simply, dryly, and sincerely."

And this from Wikipedia:

"In 1946, the Soviet Union prevented a production of Our Town in the Russian sector of occupied Berlin on the grounds that the drama is too depressing and could inspire a German suicide wave."

Post-war Germans didn't need yet another reason to end it all.

Today in Cheyenne, the sun is shining, Matthew is on his way to open ocean and Trump will not be president.

A good day to be alive and noticing it.

Writer Pat Conroy delved deep into his own life for some unforgettable books

My mother loved Pat Conroy's novel "The Great Santini."

"Why can't you write like that?" she asked, a challenge more than a taunt.

"I'm not Pat Conroy," I said.

She patted me on the hand. "I know dear. You have your own books to write."

What my mother didn't know -- and I didn't tell her -- is that I had already read "The Great Santini." A marvelous novel, funny and horrific. A family story from Beaufort, S.C., a town not unlike Daytona Beach, Fla., where I grew up. At the time, I was a college grad working two part-time jobs and looking for something a bit more permanent.

I suspect that many of you have seen "The Great Santini" the movie but have not read the book. Not a sin, especially now that we have movies on our smartphones. Books, too, but they take time, you know, and it's more likely that I can free up two hours to see a movie rather than the 40 hours it takes to read a book. Imagine spending 40 hours reading rather than going to work? That's what I'm doing now in retirement. Reading, and writing a second book based on incidents, real or imagined, from Wyoming and Colorado.

I envied Conroy for his dynamic writing style. And his ability to delve into the intimate dynamics of a family and portray it for all the world to see. He paid a price for that. Family members, pissed off at Conroy's fictional counterparts,shunned him and said bad things about him in the press. They still bought the books. Wouldn't you, faced with the fact that your brother or cousin had written something salacious about you? Conroy had a big Southern family, too -- those book sales add numbers to the best-seller stats.

Pat Conroy died this week from a fast-moving case of pancreatic cancer. He was 70. Lived the life of a best-selling author and, judging from recent Facebook quotes, was a good friend and father. His family gathered around him as he passed. He was a writer who captured family life in a new way. And he was a writer who never let readers forget where they were. Usually that was coastal Carolina (S.C. -- not the northern neighbor). Sometimers his characters were at the beach or on the inland waterway or walking the storied streets of Charleston or were college students in Columbia, as I was from 1969-71.

Several unforgettable chapters in "The Prince of Tides" were set in New York City where Conroy's main character, Tom Wingo, went to assist his sister after yet another suicide attempt. Tom and psychiatrist Susan Lowenstein had some memorable encounters during the course of the book. OK, they carried on a steamy affair. On the screen, Nick Nolte and Barbara Streisand lit things up. The movie, I'm afraid, is not very good. The book? Amazing.

Most recently, I read Conroy's memoir "My Losing Season" about his senior year playing basketball for the Citadel Military Academy. As you can infer from the title, the Citadel team didn't make it to The Final Four -- not even close. The book, however,  recounts a group of young men who played on even while being trounced by every team in the South. It's a wonderful book, one that also served to repair the Conroy-Citadel rift that followed Conroy's best-seller about a school like the Citadel, "The Lords of Discipline."

Farewell, Pat Conroy. You will live on in your books.

Reading "In Country" in the aftermath of another set of wars

It only took me 31 years to get around to reading "In Country" by Bobbie Ann Mason.

Published in 1985, the book explores post-Vietnam War America, specifically the South of rural Kentucky. The struggles of local veterans are seen through the eyes of 18-year-old  Sam (Samantha) Hughes, whose father Dwayne was killed in the war before she was born. Sam lives with her Viet vet uncle, Emmett, and might go to school at the University of Kentucky or she might get a job and marry her boyfriend, Lonnie. She's rooted in a specific place but rootless, too, as are most 18-year-olds. She keeps asking questions about the war but nobody, especially the vets who meet with Emmett every morning for coffee, want to give her any answers.

In one passage, Sam ponders a photo of her "soldier boy" daddy who was about her age when he died:

She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess  you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture.

In the mid-1980s, the war years were fresh memories. Mason's epigraph is from Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," possibly one of the most misunderstood rock songs in American history.

I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to run

Springsteen's lyrics are sprinkled throughout the book, as are songs by the Beatles, Stones, Creedence -- all the oldies from the era. The soundtrack of the Vietnam War, as one author recently called those tunes. Pop culture references abound, as do mentions of Americana: Wal-Mart, strip malls, muscle cars, Budweiser, and so on. Writing teachers sometimes tell their charges to be sparing with contemporary references, as it might date their work. Bobbie Ann Mason uses these references in order to date her work from the mid-80s, when veterans and non-veterans alike were trying to make sense of a lost crusade that nearly ripped this country apart.   This style was sometimes referred to as K-Mart Realism. This style was at its zenith when I attended grad school 1988-1991. It was shorthand for all of those white folks who once populated rural Kentucky and wide-open-spaces Wyoming. Whether draftees or volunteers, these men went to "a foreign land to kill the yellow man." They returned hoping to marry their high school sweethearts and get a job in the mines or in the factories that powered the 1970s economy. Many disappointments awaited them. Their girlfriends and high school pals had moved on. They didn't want to hear about Vietnam. Neither did older vets, the Greatest Generation, fathers of the whiners and complainers who came back from Vietnam. "Get over it," So they only talked about it with other veterans oif they just dropped out, as did Emmett, who doesn't work and spends his time watching M*A*S*H and recycling cast-off goods, much as the VC used to re-purpose all of the material the GIs threw away.

By 1985, this economy had begun to disappear,  Mines and textile mills and factories were shuttered or moved overseas for cheaper labor. To Mexico, Indonesia and, ironically, a newly energized Vietnam. Reaganomics worked to destroy unions, the foundation of blue-collar America. Vietnam veterans tended to blame liberal elites for this reversal of fortune. They were the spoiled hippie college kids who caused us to lose the war. Their love for the spotted owl and pristine wilderness killed the logging and mining industries. Their political correctness have us everything from women's lib to gay rights to Barack Obama in 2008 to -- yes -- The Donald in 2016.

Mason's characters are wonderful. The book begins with Sam, Mamaw and Emmett driving from Kentucky to Washington, D.C., in a beat-up VW bug Sam just bought from Vietnam vet Tom. We then are transported back to Hopewell in the months leading up to the trip. The book ends at The Wall, no surprise since its presence looms large throughout the book, even though it's off-stage most of the time. This a a fitting remembrance to the Vietnam War. Remember that the memorial was referred to by one opponent as a "black gash of shame." It now is almost a sacred site for Vietnam vets, home to motorcycle rallies for wounded vets and pilgrimages by vets and their families, such as the Hughes clan of Kentucky.

I'm not spoiling "In Country" to tell my readers than it ends at The Wall. The reflective surface of The Wall often leads to eerie juxtapositions, as when Sam looks at her father's name and realizes that it's her name too and she can see his face in hers. Or in veteran writer Yusef Komunyakaa's 1988 poem "Facing It:"

I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.

Remembering Watergate Summer

Remember the summer of '74? Watergate summer.

CNN's Special on "The Seventies" last night took me back. "America vs. Richard Nixon." America won, I suppose, but it was an embarrassing episode in a raucous time. Vietnam was over, sort of, although the final blow was almost a year away. Demonstrations on campuses and in the streets had disappeared, replaced by a general malaise. I was a community college graduate who worked nights in the drug and alcohol ward in Daytona Beach's county hospital. In the fall, I would be off to the University of Florida to finish my degree.

Nixon was the enemy. I'd voted for McGovern and the anti-war faction within the Democratic Party. It seemed like a majority in 1972 but it was a delusion. Voters were pissed off that year. Mad at the longhairs and the draft dodgers. They were mad that despite everything they were told, we didn't seem to be winning in Vietnam. Integration had happened, dammit, and despite fleeing to the lily-white burbs, Middle America didn't seem to be better off or any happier. Now women were uppity, burning bras and demanding to be let out of the kitchen and into the ranks of management. Homosexuals were in the spotlight, exactly where they shouldn't be.

Nixon and his people knew all this. The Southern Strategy emerged. Turn all of those disaffected white Democrats into a voting bloc that would ensure a Republican landslide. And they did it, by gum. Solid South for Nixon. Almost a Solid USA, except for those lefties in Massachusetts (where I voted for the first time) and D.C. At the same time Nixon was making election history, investigators were looking into a third-rate burglary at the Watergate Hotel. Two years later, instead of cementing a generations-long lock on the White House for Repubs, Nixon was waving bye-bye from the steps of a chopper and flying off into the history books. The CNN special was barely able to hit the high and low points of Nixon's downfall. It was sad, even for those who hated Nixon. I remember my father saying that I could gloat now that Nixon was gone. But I could tell that he was shocked and saddened by the whole episode and I didn't feel like gloating.

What did Watergate do for me? Woodward and Bernstein inspired me to become a journalist. I never was a muckraker, except on the e-pages of this blog. My journalism career led me to some interesting places, but never the corridors of power. Watergate probably cemented my liberal politics, although I didn't realize that for decades. Nixon's departure, and his distraction from happenings in Vietnam, probably led to the end of that war in 1975. Ford pardoned the draft dodgers. Nixon probably would have never done that. Nixon's election strategy was used brilliantly by Ronald Reagan. Southern states no longer vote Republican as a bloc, or at least some left the fold to vote for Obama in 2008 and 2012. There are wackos in southern legislatures. But there are wackos in Wyoming's legislature too. The good news is that the Southern Strategists are dying off. The bad news is that I'm the same age as they are and just as close to the Grim Reaper.

What comes next?

God only knows -- and he/she/it ain't saying.

Freedom to read under threat in South Carolina

As a Wyomingite, I can't really complain about another state's legislature's interference in the affairs of higher learning without bringing up some of our own home-grown depredations.

Remember how loudly Wyoming Republican lawmakers complained when former leftie radical Bill Ayers was invited to speak at UW? And, to be fair, it wasn't only Republicans. UW grad and Democratic Governor Dave Freudenthal lodged a complaint about Ayers. And remember how lawmakers screamed about the climate-change-themed "Carbon Sink" sculpture at UW? They fulminated long and loud enough to force the UW administration to spirit away the sculpture in the dead of night, burning parts of it in the UW power plant. 

So now the South Carolina Legislature wants to slash the budgets of the College of Charleston and University of South Carolina Upstate for forcing their delicate southern flowers to read LGBTQ-themed books. Conservatives in the S.C. Legislature discovered that College of Charleston and USC students were reading gay literature. Ironic in that a South Carolina-based press published Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio -- that's Hub City in Spartanburg. I hate to bring this up but publishing is one of the "creative economy" enterprises that has helped Spartanburg show up on all those "best places to live" lists the past few years. Maybe that's what really upset the legislators. After all, literacy and creative economy and smart growth are all part of the liberal conspiracy to ruin America. Next thing you know, the U.N. will be making all of us read gay books, forcing us to live in Hobbit homes, confiscating our cars and making us ride fat-tire bicycles.

This comes from Friday's The Guardian:

The College of Charleston ran into trouble after assigning Alison Bechdel's acclaimed Fun Home to students; the graphic novel details Bechdel's coming out as a lesbian as a teenager, and her relationship with her closeted father. The University of South Carolina Upstate, meanwhile, was teaching a collection of radio stories about being gay, Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio. Earlier this year, funding to the two schools of almost $70,000 (£40,000) was threatened because of the choices, described as pornographic and "forcing an agenda on teenagers" by their opponents; the issue has been under debate in the state senate this week, and authors have been coming together to stand up for LGBTQ rights.

I know a bit about the conservative South Carolina Legislature. I was a student at USC in Columbia for two years, 1969-1971. Those were stormy years.Vietnam and Kent State and riots in the streets. The Lege met right down the street from USC and its members fumed when long-haired hippies marched on the storied campus, its horseshoe once the site of a field hospital for troops wounded defending the city from that devil Sherman. Big Daddy Gov sent in the National Guard and state goons to put an end to it, busting a few heads in the process. It wasn't the National Guard who did the dirty work. They were mostly our age and not nearly as angry about protesters as the billy-club-swinging white state cops who were the age of our fathers. Heavy-handed techniques against students are not new to South Carolina or any other state. We saw some prime examples during the Occupy Movement.

So what to do? Hell, it's graduation time! Who has time to pay attention to anal-retentive legislators when there are parties to attend and beer to drink? And we still don't have a job!

Some of the most outspoken and radical people I ever met were in Columbia during that earlier trying time. You have to remember that Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were southerners, as were Jimmy Carter and Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. Not to mention all of those wonderful southern writers such as Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews and Lee Smith and all the rest. Richard Ford has been outspoken in his opposition to this latest travesty (witness the graphic above).

Go to Writers Speaking Out Loud to voice your discontent. Remember that many outspoken peace and civil rights and free speech and freedom to read advocates walked before you. Speak out like you mean it!

Why We Write

Why I write, and why I continue to blog. Flannery O'Connor wrote scores of letters during her short life. She might have been a blogger, especially as she stayed close to home during the illness that killed her at 39 in 1964. Thanks to The Bloomsbury Review for posting this on Facebook.

Selma Civil Rights March recalled by photo-essay by Wyoming's Wayne Thomas

EDITOR'S NOTE: This was a grad school project by Wayne Thomas that actually never appeared in Doubletake Magazine, which had folded by 2012. Too bad, as it was a great print mag. 

Wayne Thomas of Powell, Wyo., ranges far and wide for his photographs. His photo-essay examining the 47th anniversary of the Selma, Ala., Civil Rights March is featured in the spring 2012 issue of Doubletake Magazine Online. Wayne returned to Dallas County, Ala., to document the area in photos and story in this very moving piece. Read it (and view it) at http://www.waynethomasphotography.com/selma. 

Our family moved from Colorado to the South in 1964. What had only been a distant struggle seen on TV, now became something we experienced every day. In case you don't remember what happened in Alabama back in 1965, maybe these historic photos will jog your memory:

James Karales (American, 1930–2002). Selma-to-Montgomery March for Voting Rights in 1965. Photographic print. Located in the James Karales Collection, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

John Lewis (on the ground), head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is beat up by Alabama State Troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala. From the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (center) joins others in the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on March 21, 1965.

Pat Conroy's response to the "censors, book-banners and teacher-haters" of Charleston, W.V.

Author Pat Conroy has witnessed his books being challenged and banned 

all over the country. Read a letter he wrote to the editor of the 

Charleston Gazette in response to one such incident in 2007, shared in

honor of Banned Books Week (from the Open Road Media blog):

October 24, 2007
 
I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie
Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of
parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my
novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this
controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work.
These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get
involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know
the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do
not mess with McCoys.
 
I've enjoyed a lifetime love affair with English teachers, just like
the ones who are being abused in Charleston, West Virginia, today. My
English teachers pushed me to be smart and inquisitive, and they
taught me the great books of the world with passion and cunning and
love. Like your English teachers, they didn't have any money either,
but they lived in the bright fires of their imaginations, and they
taught because they were born to teach the prettiest language in the
world. I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to
damage a kid. They take an unutterable joy in opening up the known
world to their students, but they are dishonored and unpraised because
of the scandalous paychecks they receive. In my travels around this
country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I
could not tell you why. Charleston, West Virginia, is showing clear
signs of really hurting theirs, and I would be cautious about the word
getting out.
 
In 1961, I entered the classroom of the great Eugene Norris, who set
about in a thousand ways to change my life. It was the year I read The
This letter first appeared on the Open Road Media blog during Banned
Books Week 2011.Catcher in the Rye, under Gene's careful tutelage, and

I adore that book to this very day. Later, a parent complained to the

school board, and Gene Norris was called before the board to defend his

teaching of this book. He asked me to write an essay describing the book's
galvanic effect on me, which I did. But Gene's defense of The Catcher
in the Rye was so brilliant and convincing in its sheer power that it
carried the day. I stayed close to Gene Norris till the day he died. I
delivered a eulogy at his memorial service and was one of the
executors of his will. Few in the world have ever loved English
teachers as I have, and I loathe it when they are bullied by
know-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.
 
About the novels your county just censored: The Prince of Tides and
Beach Music are two of my darlings which I would place before the
altar of God and say, "Lord, this is how I found the world you made."
They contain scenes of violence, but I was the son of a Marine Corps
fighter pilot who killed hundreds of men in Korea, beat my mother and
his seven kids whenever he felt like it, and fought in three wars. My
youngest brother, Tom, committed suicide by jumping off a
fourteen-story building; my French teacher ended her life with a
pistol; my aunt was brutally raped in Atlanta; eight of my classmates
at The Citadel were killed in Vietnam; and my best friend was killed
in a car wreck in Mississippi last summer. Violence has always been a
part of my world. I write about it in my books and make no apology to
anyone. In Beach Music, I wrote about the Holocaust and lack the
literary powers to make that historical event anything other than
grotesque. People cuss in my books.
 
People cuss in my real life. I cuss, especially at Citadel basketball
games. I'm perfectly sure that Steve Shamblin and other teachers
prepared their students well for any encounters with violence or
profanity in my books just as Gene Norris prepared me for the profane
language in The Catcher in the Rye forty-eight years ago.
 
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave
anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the
genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty ofprogre
language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna
Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome
Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the
streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The
Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for
Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced
myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career,
all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up
every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I
cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy
and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.
 
The school board of Charleston, West Virginia, has sullied that gift
and shamed themselves and their community. You've now entered the
ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will
spread. Good teachers will avoid you as though you had cholera. But
here is my favorite thing: Because you banned my books, every kid in
that county will read them, every single one of them. Because
bookbanners are invariably idiots, they don't know how the world
works— but writers and English teachers do.
 
I salute the English teachers of Charleston, West Virginia, and send
my affection to their students. West Virginians, you've just done what
history warned you against—you've riled a Hatfield.
 
Sincerely,
 
Pat Conroy
 
This letter first appeared on the Open Road Media blog during Banned
Books Week 2011.

Live from the hummingbirdminds bunker -- not-so-live coverage of the DNC from Charlotte

To my readers:

You may have noticed that I did quite a bit of posting last week about the Republican National Convention in Tampa without the bother of leaving home. Many thanks to Meg Lanker-Simons at Cognitive Dissonance out of Laramie, who scooped all of us with interviews with former Repub Chair Michael Steele and NBC's Chuck Todd, and that post-convention Q&A with Clint Eastwood's chair. Also thanks to Progress Florida, who maintained a web site about goings-on in the streets during the RNC.

I'm gearing up to provide the same service during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Last night in Denver, I bade adieu to several Wyoming Democratic Party delegates on the eve of their departure for the convention. Jeran Artery, Kate Wright and Ken McCauley promised to keep in touch via the usual e-means. I have no reason to suspect that they won't keep their word, although once they hit the ground in Charlotte, time will speed up and they will be caught up in a wave of speeches and floor votes, not to mention the sea of  hors d'oeuvres they will be forced to consume at the endless flurry of receptions sponsored by unions, conservation groups, feminist organizations, civil rights activists and other nogoodnik socialists.

But they will keep us posted because they are Democrats and they will make sure that the blog posts get through, come hell or high water or mounds of Carolina BBQ ribs.  

You can get the news feed from Netroots Nation (9 a.m.-4 p.m. EST, Tues.-Thurs.). The NN folks are live-streaming from Charlotte. NN promises this:

We’re teaming up with Democracy for America this week in Charlotte to provide a live studio where progressive leaders, pundits, and your favorite bloggers and reporters will join us for progressive conversations. You’ll hear from folks like Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Donna Edwards, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Sen. Jeff Merkley, Van Jones, Lizz Winstead, The Nation’s Ari Berman, Gov. Howard Dean and more.

The live coverage will be hosted by Cliff Schecter, founder and president of progressive public relations firm Libertas LLC, best-selling author (2008′s The Real McCain), nationally syndicated columnist and regular pundit on such shows as The Young Turks on Current TV, The Majority Report with Sam Seder and Take Action News with David Shuster. Cliff is also a co-founder of Washington DC’s progressive radio station, We Act Radio (AM 1480).

If you want to test your knowledge of N.C. (the Old North State), you can take this quiz here. I didn't do too well, although I did get the trick question about Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt. I grew up with NASCAR, y'all. BTW, if you Dems get bored, the NASCAR Hall of Fame is located in Charlotte.

More later...

Without the South, we'd have a better country -- but the music and novels would suck

Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen offers some alternative thoughts about Abe Lincoln’s legacy during this President's Day weekend:

While Abraham Lincoln certainly had some admirable traits, recall that his main goal was to hold the Union together. Now, ponder what a fine country we'd have if Lincoln had just let the South go in peace. 

Without the South, we'd probably enjoy decent passenger rail service, improved public education and single-payer health insurance. Our federal taxes would be lower, as many of the old Confederate states enjoy substantial subsidies. Mississippi, for instance, collects $2.02 from the federal government for every dollar it pays in federal taxes. It's $1.78 for Louisiana, $1.65 for Alabama and $1.51 for Virginia. 

--clip-- 

Granted, American popular music would be worse than dreadful without Southern contributions.

Not to mention American fiction writing without Southern writers. Instead of U.S. writers from the South, the following would be notable writers from the C.S.A.: William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Harry Crews, Rita Dove, Zora Neale Hurston, Peter Taylor, Barry Hannah, Pat Conroy, Rosemary Daniell, Lewis Nordan, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Kaye Gibbons, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Tretheway, Barbara Kingsolver, and so on. 

Thing is, they might not have become the writers we know without the angst that comes with being defeated rebels. And there are some African-American writers on this list who might not have had the freedom to write in an agrarian slave-based country.   

Read Quillen’s column at http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_19983335?source=pop

DNC Chair: "Mitt Romney's campaign is cratering"

From a Wyoming Democratic Party press release:

Tonight, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz released the following statement on the results of the Republican primary in South Carolina: 

“If tonight proved one thing, it's that the central rationale of Mitt Romney’s campaign is cratering.  He came into South Carolina  with a 20 point lead -- a state where jobs and the economy is the number one issue -- and the candidate who hung his entire candidacy on these issues, Mitt Romney, saw his support collapse.

“Why?  Because Mitt Romney's been exposed as being out of touch with the middle class, and voters are seeing that he lives by another set of rules. He’s refused to level with voters, and now he’s in trouble.  Anyone who goes into a state with a significant double digit lead yet ends up losing that support in a week, is someone who is failing to connect.

“Voters in South Carolina saw that Mitt Romney has no core values, and that he will say anything to get elected.  He’s been exposed as having plans and policies that would keep his taxes low, and make them even lower, while doing nothing for the middle class.  The people of South Carolina also began to see what Romney’s brand of free enterprise really is: destroying companies and jobs to enrich himself while working families suffer.  Tonight, they rejected it.  At the end of the day, voters want someone they can trust, who shares their vision and who understands their plight.  And they are finding that Mitt Romney is not that person.

“Regardless of who becomes the Republican nominee, all of the candidates in the race support the failed policies of the past that drove us to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  That’s not what the American people want, and that’s why they know that the clear choice in this election is President Obama.”