Thursday, December 18, 2003
The beauty of sprawl
The other day I dropped my car off at some God-forsaken strip-mall in Baton Rouge to rotate my tires (this is how cool and exciting people like me spend their days off). The service would take about an hour and a half, I was told, so I made a plan to walk down the street about half a mile to a bar/eatery that makes excellent pastrami po' boys (a good compromise between Jewish Heath and the burdgeoning Southerner welling up from within).
So I started my trek from in front of the WalMart Superstore heading towards the sidewalk I assumed would lead me to my destination. Except there was no sidewalk. Anywhere. In fact there wasn't even a crosswalk from any of the strip-mall's exits. In other words, one cannot legally leave Isle Suburbia without a car.
This would have been fine - a little jaywalking never hurt anybody - except that the no sidewalk rule appeared to extend as far as I could see and no pastrami po' boy is worth dodging traffic on a busy four-lane road for half a mile.
So I retreated to what looked like a promising plan B - a bookstore with an attached coffee shop. Kind of lame and yuppie, but also somewhat comforting to this Californian. I should have been tipped off by the name: Books A Million.
Shockingly enough, they didn't have any of the books I was looking for so I headed toward the history section, which was essentially broken up into two categories: "World History," which took up about three shelves, and American History which took up the next 15 or so.
You can imagine how big the Civil, er, War of Northern Aggression section was and, as I was perusing the titles there, I came across two historians the North doesn't want you to know about: James Ronald Kennedy and his twin brother Walter Donald Kennedy.
This tag-team of Southern "history enthusiasts" (lacking the proper degree, I guess, this is how they refer to themselves) set the record straight on the evil Union and it's illegal war.
Their books include "Why Not Freedom! America's Revolt Against Big Government" (shouldn't that be "Why Not Freedom?!"?) and the provocative "Myths of American Slavery."
These, however, pale in comparison to their daring defense of the Confederacy in "The South Was Right!" (with a Confederate flag displayed prominently on the cover) and "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" in which their impenetrable arguments for the South's moral high ground include, uh, well some Northerners were racist, too. Their enthusiasm for exclamation points is matched only by their zeal for the Confederacy, which seems to occassionaly impede their memory.
You see, "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" was published in 1998 but these brothers dim answered that question in 1994 when they published "The South Was Right!" But who can fault these lovable proponents of Southern Culture?
Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land...
So I started my trek from in front of the WalMart Superstore heading towards the sidewalk I assumed would lead me to my destination. Except there was no sidewalk. Anywhere. In fact there wasn't even a crosswalk from any of the strip-mall's exits. In other words, one cannot legally leave Isle Suburbia without a car.
This would have been fine - a little jaywalking never hurt anybody - except that the no sidewalk rule appeared to extend as far as I could see and no pastrami po' boy is worth dodging traffic on a busy four-lane road for half a mile.
So I retreated to what looked like a promising plan B - a bookstore with an attached coffee shop. Kind of lame and yuppie, but also somewhat comforting to this Californian. I should have been tipped off by the name: Books A Million.
Shockingly enough, they didn't have any of the books I was looking for so I headed toward the history section, which was essentially broken up into two categories: "World History," which took up about three shelves, and American History which took up the next 15 or so.
You can imagine how big the Civil, er, War of Northern Aggression section was and, as I was perusing the titles there, I came across two historians the North doesn't want you to know about: James Ronald Kennedy and his twin brother Walter Donald Kennedy.
This tag-team of Southern "history enthusiasts" (lacking the proper degree, I guess, this is how they refer to themselves) set the record straight on the evil Union and it's illegal war.
Their books include "Why Not Freedom! America's Revolt Against Big Government" (shouldn't that be "Why Not Freedom?!"?) and the provocative "Myths of American Slavery."
These, however, pale in comparison to their daring defense of the Confederacy in "The South Was Right!" (with a Confederate flag displayed prominently on the cover) and "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" in which their impenetrable arguments for the South's moral high ground include, uh, well some Northerners were racist, too. Their enthusiasm for exclamation points is matched only by their zeal for the Confederacy, which seems to occassionaly impede their memory.
You see, "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" was published in 1998 but these brothers dim answered that question in 1994 when they published "The South Was Right!" But who can fault these lovable proponents of Southern Culture?
Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land...
