Don’t Sweep Me With No Broom

Ah, nothing like African-American stock characters to make you nostalgic for a kinder, gentler time, before the PC-police sterilized our vibrant culture. The singin’, dancin’ Sambo is a largely forgotten relic, the Magical Negro has been banished to performing at Tea Parties, and the genuflecting Mammy left the breakfast table in 1989.

But it seems that the “superstitious Southern black” character still sells.

These have been showing up on the R train lately:

(click to read the fine print)

Before you get all hot and bothered, yes, it’s impossible to tell from her advertisement whether Mrs. Williams herself is Africa-American, and I’m not assuming that she is. Nonetheless, she’s clearly using an African-American stereotype to promote herself.

What we can tell from the ad is that Mrs. Williams has the “solutions to the mysteries of the Deep South.” I’m sold, but is New York City the best place to make that pitch? Of course, who am I to question a “Holy Gifted Woman?” She must have information about her target audience McKinsey can only dream of.

It turns out that quite a few “women who do it for you in a hurry” are fighting for market share; maybe Midwood is her hard won soothsaying turf.

In 1988, Mrs. Valerie went nationwide with her Southern-fried skills! Yeah, she’s bad.

But she ain’t peer-reviewed bad. Way back in 1981, their colleague Sister Kennedy graced the rarefied pages of the Journal of the National Medical Association! (last page, bottom left)

Science!? Peer-reviewed journals!? I’ll stick with Mrs. Williams and miracles, thank you very much.

Stayed In Mississippi A Day Too Long

It’s no wonder that the public is fed up with the mainstream media.

The country’s leading reporters hem and haw at the direction of their corporate paymasters, kowtowing to post-liberal political correctness. The truth, along with the informed public that sustains democratic society, is lost to their career-obsessed machinations.

Even opinion columnists, the ostensibly mule-headed conscience of the lamestream media, are lately tempering their views. Like an Antaeus stupefied by corporate lethargy, their gravity weakens daily; buoyed by their complacent hubris, they are soon to lose contact with the bedrock of public trust to which they owe their readership.

Leading the freedom-loathing charge? Who would have guessed, but Bob Herbert (not Bobby Hebert, but hey, any excuse for a WHO DAT!) in his recent column about the life sentences Jamie and Gladys Scott received for their role in an armed robbery, in which he gets all wishy-washy about 21st century Mississippi:

“This is Mississippi we’re talking about, a place that in many ways has not advanced much beyond the Middle Ages.”

Come on, Bob. Man up and tell us what you really think. It’s kind of your job.

I’m Gonna Get Up In The Morning

The Wolf howled his plans to hit Highway 49 in search of a jug of wine and a wayward woman, and wound up laying claim to yet another cornerstone of the electric blues canon (it was a many-cornered edifice ). I actually did hit that fabled highway every morning, but never got a song out of it, genre-busting or otherwise.

Needless to say, commuting is not the stuff of myth.

Or should I say, wasn’t the stuff of myth. Officially over or not, the Great Recession has left millions with nothing more to their mornings than expiring unemployment benefits, eroding skills, and fading hope. After the Great Depression, the Greatest Generation accepted 5% unemployment as “structural,” but insisted on blurring the ethical implications by expanding New Deal-style social programs.  The spend-in-the-face-of-adversity generation(s) doesn’t drive such a hard bargain, and looks set to accept 9% unemployment as the “new normal,” so long as they (we) can cower behind facile bewilderment over collapsed “intellectual edifices.”

My humble commute through Middle America may yet become the stuff of legend.

In August, Mississippi had the 11^th-highest state unemployment rate in the country. The pain there is widespread, acute and uneven;  the New York Times’ “Geography of a Recession” map shows that while unemployment in many counties there tops 20%, the folks along the southern half of the Highway 49 corridor are struggling somewhat less than the rest of the state.

The map shows a swath of sub-10% unemployment tracing the highway from Gulfport to Jackson. It’s the only section of the state with contiguous counties below 10%, if you’ll kindly pardon the ever-contrary Coast. Only two other counties in the entire state – Lafayette, home of Ole Miss, and Desoto, in suburban Memphis – have breached the low side of 10%.

Conversely, there are only two counties in New York above 10%, one of which is my new home of Kings County.

The job market in the south-49 corridor, if you will, may be healthier than that of its neighbors, but it’s by no means good, with unemployment ranging from 6.8% in Rankin County to 10% in Covington County.

Curiously, the ostensible correlation between the highway and employment is reversed north of Jackson; the Delta counties that 49 runs through before merging with 61 – Yazoo, Humphreys and Sunflower – all have higher unemployment rates – 13.9%, 15.8% and 16.6%, respectively – than their neighbors to the east and west.

Read that again: 13.9%, 15.8%, and 16.6%. And those aren’t the worst off. The rate in Noxubee County is 22.1%.

If the south-49/employment correlation is only anecdotal, the map data tell us nothing about any possible causation.  The 5% increments are too blunt to explain the situation in any meaningful way, and it’s it’s only a convenient coincidence that the counties along the highway barely fall into the lighter orange 5-10% category.

Yeah, I’m confused now, too. After studying this map, there’s only one thing we can be sure of: folks along Highway 49, and throughout Mississippi and indeed the country, have a lot more than women and whiskey stores resting on their weary minds.

My Whole World Lies Waiting Behind Door Number Three

South Mississippi a game show powerhouse? Apparently so: last night, Waveland native Michael Grimm won America’s Got Talent, and Whitney Miller, of Poplarville, took top honors in MasterChef.

Fortunately, South Mississippians have learned to keep their cool when surrounded by the rich and famous.

How they controlled themselves last summer, when Brett Favre (I almost spelled it like it’s pronounced!) made a habit of attending Oak Grove High School football practices, I’ll never know.

Jimmy Buffett  showing up at USM, his alma mater? Shriek!

And let’s not forget Tiger Woods dignifying the humble ‘burg with his sex rehab stint at Pine Grove. God bless the decent folks for giving him his space.

Those are some big, dubious shoes to fill, Michael and Whitney.

No One Can Stop It Once It’s Fired No One Can Control It

That anti-Muslim vitriol would consume a small fringe following the 9/11 attacks was inevitable. That it was roundly condemned – unequivocally, recall, by Bush, Jr. – shows that, all in all, we American are a pretty decent bunch.

We’re certainly not perfect, and sometimes pusillanimously abandon our ideals in the face of fear. So do lots of countries; as the Fifth Republic’s ostensibly post-ethnic conception of citizenship shudders under the realities of globalism, France has been rounding up legal Roma immigrants on the basis of their ethnicity and kicking them out of the country. Western Europe may shame us in our resistance to social justice, but when it comes to pluralism, even the New South can thumb its nose at Old Europe.

Sure, our own attitudes toward immigration can get ugly, and Arizona’s “papers law” is reprehensible. Still, it’s hard to imagine the wholesale deportation of an ethnic group in the United States.

On the ninth anniversary of 9/11, however, we’re in dangerous territory; almost ten years on, the worst sorts of anti-Muslim sentiment have left the fringe and are becoming frighteningly mainstream.

There is simply no excuse for that under any circumstance, and certainly none in light of the fact that, as Obama pointed out Friday, many Muslims are fighting the – our – war on terror, and many have made the ultimate sacrifice. The plain truth is that as I write this, and as you read it, Muslims are on serving on the front lines in that war.

Even crazy-person-publicity-hound Terry Jones balked when Gen. Petraeus pulled the putting-our-troops-in-harm’s-way card. Apparently, those demanding fidelity to the “real” America see no contradiction in benefiting from Muslim soldiers’ wartime sacrifice while refusing to accept them as full-fledged, honest-to-god Americans.

We’ve been down this road before, and it’s not pretty. It brings to mind the story of Lanier Phillips, who grew up in the Jim Crow South, discovered his dignity in the most unlikely of places while serving in the Navy during World War Two, then retired in Gulfport. Here‘s a link to an interview he gave NPR in 2002. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Yes, we’ve been down this road. Let’s not go there again.

And The Storms Will Blow From Off Toward…New York City?

While the U.S. Gulf Coast has thus far escaped even the threat of a being struck by a hurricane this year, there is a (very remote) possibility that hurricane Earl may make landfall in or around New York City Friday afternoon.

As if that isn’t strange enough, as I type this, the temperature in Brooklyn New York is 93.3 (F), 6.3 degrees warmer than Brooklyn Mississippi, which is enjoying an unseasonably cool afternoon at 87.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Mississippi Public Broadcasting reported Monday that Oxford, the self-proclaimed cultural and intellectual capital of Mississippi, is considering ending its ban on Sunday alcohol sales. Blue laws are still popular throughout Mississippi; almost half of the state’s 82 counties are dry, and it wasn’t until 2009 that you could drink liquor in the capital city’s airport bar.

In fact, Mississippi didn’t even repeal Prohibition until 1966, and only after the long arm of the law reached out to some upper-crust Jacksonians in particularly embarrassing fashion. Coast trash or not, I’m proud that the reprobates south of I-10 never paid much mind to Prohibition, national or state, and that to this day, bars down there can and do stay open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

That’s more than the City That Never Sleeps can say, as its bars must close at 4 a.m. Still, folks here, where the boozy Sunday brunch is a civic institution, don’t share the South’s conflicted relationship with alcohol. While that’s generally been refreshing, I have noticed that Saturday night revelry definitely loses something without the juxtaposition of a solemn Sunday morning.

With that in mind, and with apologies to Allan Sillitoe, here are some songs for Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, Bible Belt style:

At first glance, Blake Shelton’s “The More I Drink” is just another pleasantly adequate testament to Nashville’s assembly-line efficiency. By themselves, the lyrics sound more like step 1 of 12 than a pop song, but in the context of a sanitized honky-tonk number, lament gives way to perverse celebration. More cleverly, by marrying the lyrical hook – “the more I drink, the more I drink” – to an uplifting, gospel-approved chord progression (major three to major four), this Saturday night song subtly reminds us that Sunday morning is just around the corner.

It’s easy to assume that South Louisianans enjoy a tranquil  joie de vivre, but in reality, they just compartmentalize 11 months worth of guilt into 1 month of repentance. We’ll leave Lent to the church and focus on Little Bob and the Lollipops’ Mardi Gras staple “I Got Loaded.” It’s one of my favorite songs, and a near-perfect example of pop genius; lost in the hook, the listener can’t help but feel, if not find, meaning in otherwise meaningless lyrics.

As Lil’ Bob breezily recounts a few loaded nights and eagerly anticipates another, the lyrical symmetry betrays the deflating monotony of the endless party. Then, the minor chord in the chorus, held a few bars too long, challenges his  insistence that “it’s gonna be all right,” and makes you wonder who he’s trying to convince. No worries! This is a pop tune of the first order, and it really does turn out all right, as each chorus resolves in truly redemptive, feel-good fashion.

That’s fine for Saturday night. What about Sunday morning?

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” is the go-to song for post-party reflection, but like Oxford, Kris Kristofferson’s supposed erudition and factitious down-home style are obvious affectations – as the saying goes, if you have to tell people you’re a lady…

Johnny Cash’s gravitas may make his version compelling, but confessional songwriting falls flat when it’s time to repent. True Bible-Belt-caliber guilt demands a reflection on more than the night before, as Johnny Cash and the Carter Family show here.

That speaks for itself, but I will say this: no, children, he doesn’t mean that ironically.