Those little town blues

By Capt. Fogg

Small town newspapers. When I first moved to Florida over 11 years ago, Little Boots was in the white house and although the fear machine was running on afterburner and everyone was in the process of never forgetting and sending money to Taiwan manufacturers of plastic automobile flag holders, you still had headlines declaring that some local fisherman had caught a record Snook or irate letters about litter in the park. Now it's outrage. Every day. Even the fish are angry.

Printed opprobrium grew over the Bush years, at least those quasi-literate, misspelled, cliche-ridden letters to the editor written in impotent rage at Mexican farm workers, people on food stamps, Liberals, immigrants, ethnic minorities, liberals, Muslims, atheists, Jews, Democrats -- did I mention Liberals? Yes, sure, I and a few others sometimes wrote ( brilliantly, I must admit) alternate opinons, much to the further wrath of the toothless unwashed, but it's a small town as I said, and word gets around and I really don't want to carry a gun in my bathing suit or they may think I'm happy to see them. Discretion, valor and all that.

Of course it's hardly new. I remember, back in the mid 60's, living in long hair and sandals in the tiny, rural, University town of Hamilton New York. I remember when the school had an open symposium on Communism, and the good, go-to-church and keep-Christ-in-Christmas locals flooded the opinion page with demands to bomb the bastards back to the stone age - now. Small town newspapers. I wish I could believe that they didn't represent America, that they weren't just some boil on the ass of an otherwise great nation. 

Take the Lincoln Journal, of Lincoln County, West Virginia. Seems public sentiment supported the termination of a teacher for fear she would "turn her students gay." Faced with a reader's voice mail (I used reader loosely here) asserting that "We were really glad to hear that School Board is getting rid of them queers. The next thing is we need to get rid of all the niggers, the spics, the kikes and the wops,"
they decided to print it. 

 I don't fault them. Such people should be heard so we know what we're dealing with -- and where they are. Now my local paper would probably not have, and it doesn't have a voice-mail line for illiterates. Most of us here after all, come from elsewhere where literacy of a certain minimal level is fairly common, but those sentiments aren't exactly rare with the locals either.

You know even them Catholics, they are wrong as baby eaters. We need to clear them people out and have good, white, God fearing Christians and everybody else needs to be put to death for their abominations. We’ll keep Lincoln County white and right. Thank you. 

You're welcome. White and Right indeed. I hope you do just that and perhaps building a wall will help the local economy for a while. In fact I hope everyone like you moves to Lincoln County. It would be nice to have all y'all in one place and I hope there's room. I'd hate to have to use up more than one of our precious nukes, but as for the stone age -- are you sure you're ready for that big an upgrade?

(Cross-posted from Human Voices)