In the Good

I know guys who treat their football and their politics exactly the same. I always thought that was such a missed opportunity and a misunderstanding of what these things mean. Mississippi is the poorest of the poor states. What we do with our governmental resources can be the difference between life and death. We do pretty well in football, although I’m legitimately disturbed at how much money we spend on it. In a place where most farms are failing, small businesses are dead or dying, and we can’t feed everybody, is it really worth devoting that many resources to a sport?

Since Monday, I’ve had three conversations about how Millsaps should make an effort to represent both political spectrums equally. What’s interesting about that is how none of these people share a political perspective. They only share a feeling that we should do better.

I agree. However, I would make one change. Instead of representing both political spectrums, how about if Millsaps represents no political spectrum at all? How about if we just teach what’s true, and do the best we can, and then trust that we’re producing the kind of mind that the students themselves can develop their own perspectives, without parroting ours.

I’ve met these kids. I just watched one of them eat fourteen and one-half hot dogs. I trust them. I have enormous faith in them. I think that’s where we should start.

When Daddy was active, well, when Daddy was alive. He was always active when he was alive. He would joke that on Monday, he’d get a call saying Millsaps was too liberal, and on Tuesday, he’d get a call saying Millsaps was too conservative. On Wednesday, he’d get a call about how he and George Harmon were doing every little thing wrong. On Thursday, he’d get a call about how he and George Harmon were doing every little thing right. On Friday, he’d get a call from Bill Goodman or George Pickett, Sr., to discuss how we really stand on things.

Daddy used to say, “As long as I get equal complaints from every side, I figure we’re in the good.” It sounded like he was kidding, but he wasn’t.

A guy who taught me a great deal about political perspective was Howard Bavendar. Bav was pretty liberal. I was pretty conservative. What he taught me was to talk about what was happening in Ireland, my second homeland. In Ireland, he said, people had lost track of the principles behind green and orange. All they thought about was the last offense the other side committed, and that alone drove “the troubles” and cost many lives.

The easiest way in the world to raise money or get votes is to make people mad or angry. Both sides do this and almost nothing else anymore. Political discourse isn’t about ideas anymore. It’s about position. Position is bulllshit.

I’ve written about how I’m a man without a country politically. This began when some Tea Party guys decided to attack Thad Cochran’s wife while she was dying in a nursing home. What the hell, dude? What the hell?

You should do that kinda shit to the other party. To do it to your own party is literally insane, and yet that’s where we’re at.

I hate when James Carville is right, but he’s right more than he’s wrong. He predicted that MAGA would come apart by June. So far this week, both Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson have turned on Trump. What the hell, dude? None of this would have happened if people had voted for Chris Christie as I did. I guess nobody asked me.

People used to call Bob McElvaine a radical. I don’t think he was. I think he taught about radicals. He had a political perspective, but he was pretty good about teaching the whole story about the tumultuous times he covered. Most of the eras he taught about, I was either an enfant or a small child. Who was liberal, who was conservative, who was a conformist, and who was a radical was all up in the air in those days. I write all the time about how, when I was born, Mississippi was literally and figuratively on fire, but by the time I was fifteen, it was better. A lot can change in fifteen years.

I see schools now advertising that they are “Solid Conservative, Christian Universities.” I think that’s such a mistake. What they’re doing is promising parents that their children will come away from college believing the same things their grandparents did, but do you want that? Do you want to decide your child’s political and social perspective for them? I can promise you, your child does not want that, and I’ll go a step further, you should trust your experience as a parent to trust that they’ll make the right choice for them.

I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t give a shit about not having a party anymore. George H Bush and Ronald Reagan are both dead. I’m not worried about disappointing them. Some of what they tried to do worked. Some of it didn’t. That’s part of the plan. I sure as hell miss their position on imports and migrant labor these days.

Yesterday at the Chi Omega function, I discussed with Red Sonja how the Mississippi and Louisiana agribusiness is in trouble because we don’t have access to migrant workers this year. That’s why crawfish are so expensive. They don’t have anybody to bring in the harvest. Every argument about how “they should have come here legally” is meaningless if I have to eat Vietnamese crawfish. According to the plan Bush and Reagan laid out for them, they WERE here legally. Then we pulled the rug out from under them. Thanks, dude. Do you wanna help me haul in these crawfish?

I mention that for a particular reason. Red Sonja is nineteen. That she has a sober and serious opinion on these things at nineteen, after two semesters at Millsaps, tells me we’re on the right track. These are students we can trust with their own perspectives and opinions. We’re here to teach them, not to make them.

I broke and went into the cave largely because I wasn’t doing things according to my own judgment and my own perspectives. Now that I’m back and getting stronger every day, those days are done. At best, I’ve got twenty years to accomplish all the things I let rot while I was in the cave.

I’m gonna make some people happy, and I’m gonna make some people mad. As long as there’s about the same amount of both, I figure I’m in the good.