FISHTRAP HOLLOW — From the barn come the boards that serve as underpinning for my old house. They are brought to its high side and screwed into the battened cedar for the season. Warnings here are for a freeze.
Firewood for the night is at the ready, fueling the first stove fire of the season. At the kitchen table, I read two newspapers. I collected the papers along the long way home, bisecting the state, from the Mississippi Coast to these Hills. No newspaper makes deliveries way out here anymore.
A sweet potato in the stove. An extra scoop of dry food for the dogs. I concentrate on all the things humans fret about naturally, essentially. As cold weather approaches, we crave warmth, shelter, food, safety. Want our backs to the wind, dogs at our feet. Music in our ear, biscuits in the oven.
I soon wonder why I bothered with the newspapers. They depress me. All the news is about the midterm election — the millions spent, the challenges filed, the shenanigans pulled.
If you are keeping score, Mississippi might now lead even Louisiana in the never-ending contest for most unsavory but entertaining political races. Once you trespass in a nursing home to steal fodder and a photograph for a political advertisement, you can lay claim to a royal flush of devilment. Makes Richard Nixon’s merry band of dirty tricksters look like Cub Scouts on a camping trip.
I grew up in Alabama believing all other states must have a saner political climate than the one created by our bantamweight fighter, George Wallace. I was wrong. Recent political stunts make Wallace look like a piker. From the bridges of New Jersey, to the shores of Miami Beach.
Wallace, at least, finished out his checkered career without getting rich. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Was he too busy demagoguing to steal?
I think about my own everyday concerns and those of my friends and neighbors. FDR’s Freedom from Worries were not at the center of the recent political campaigns in Mississippi. Give or take a token effort or two, there basically were no campaigns after the raunchy primaries.
Nobody talked about expanding Medicaid. Nobody talked much about disappearing jobs or inadequate wages, or, if they did, offered few details for a cure. Nobody talked about roads, bridges, the environment. There were no debates.
And the voters didn’t demand answers.
The incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran of the Republican persuasion hid. After a disgusting Republican primary, you almost couldn’t blame him.
His Democratic challenger Travis Childers was a warm body, a sacrificial lamb treading water in case Mississippi ever becomes a two-party state again. Voters yawned.
If the state’s successful football programs had not kept us relatively content, citizens might have been tempted to move. Where would we go? To the right and left of us, same story. Alabama’s politicians of both stripes are marching off to federal prisons, and Louisiana is Louisiana.
Texas? We don’t want to go there.
We get what we pay for, or at least what special interests pay for. And while we fiddle around with domestic concerns, Rome — and Mississippi — burn.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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