My Sunday Feeling

 They must be mad enough to spit over in College Station.  Or gig somebody.  Or whatever it is Aggies do when they are high pissed.  

You see, Texas A&M joined the Southeastern Conference 10 years or so.  Sure they did it because the SEC helped their brand more than the Big 12 did.  There is that.  But mainly they did it just to get out from under Texas and Oklahoma.  Particularly Texas who they hate worse than poison.

Imagine the amusement in Aggieland when the news came out that the Longhorn and Sooners brass had made overtures to the SEC to join it.  And that, depending on who and what you read, it’s pretty much a done deal.  

It gets even better.  It’s not clear that the President of Texas A&M or any of the other “member institutions” of the Big 12 knew anything about it.  Which if true represents the biggest snub since Trump failed to check on Mike Pence during the Great Insurrection.  

This is all very interesting.  First of all, if this goes down it is really bad news for Arkansas.  The Razorbacks recruit Texas pretty hard.  Part of the pitch is their membership in the SEC.  If UT and OU get in, the exclusive allure of that argument goes out the window. 

Still this is more proof that the conferences, especially with the prospect of players having NIL rights, will be aligned between the “haves” and the “have nots” with conferences blowing up and schools looking to knife their former colleagues in the back.  This is all good news for, say, Notre Dame if it decides to lift it’s skirt and quit being independent in football.  It is bad news for, oh I don’t know, Tulane comes to mind for some reason.

Still, OU and UT are used to pretty much calling the shots over there in the Big 12, as Tommy Tuberville, I mean the distinguished United States Senator Tuberville, discovered when he left the Chair of Football at Auburn for Texas Tech.  If , indeed, they join the SEC, they will soon learn that they left their fiefdom for an autonomous collective.  

See, in the SEC it is share and share alike.  For example, gridiron punching bag Vanderbilt gets the same cut of the swag as Alabama.  It is a charter member of the SEC and will never get shown the door if for no reason than everybody schedules their homecoming games against the Commodores. Then again, the Commodores are as good as anybody in baseball.  

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.  The notion of the Longhorns playing in Tuscaloosa or the aforementioned Commodores taking on the Sooners in Norman just doesn’t seem right. 

But I shed no tears for the Aggies.  They got damn near as much money as Texas.  They will figure this out. And you know? Texas is but a shadow of their former self.  They were doing good to go, like, 7-4 in the Big 12.  Here’s a prediction: Arkansas kicks their ass up here when they play them in September or so.  Welcome to the SEC Bevo!

But it sure is funny-at least to me- if all of this caught the Aggies or anybody else in the Big 12 by surprise. Snake dens are not confined to OPEC. And bidness is bidness.

As an aside, it is my honor-if you want to call it that-to be covered up with Vanderbilt people in my life.  I called my law school buddy Don, who has known futility both as a fan of the Commodores and the Tulane Green Wave.  Being in Los Angeles, he does not have his finger on the day-to-day pulse of SEC football, UCLA not being in the center of the known football universe. But he was raised up in Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama.  He understands the pathology.  

I called him up the other day to inform him that it looked like Oklahoma and Texas were going to join the SEC.

Don had not heard this news. He burst out in what sounded like helpless laughter.  I think I heard his phone land on his desk as he most likely covered his eyes with his hands.

Bidness is bidness.  And the world has gone crazy.  

Maybe Tulane can end up in the Mountain West.  Stay tuned as they used to say. 

 

 

My Sunday Feeling

 When I was a kid I used to watch the political conventions.  I thought they were pretty exciting.  Nowadays you couldn’t catch me dead watching one.  Or a Presidential debate either.  Although I have to say that I watched the first Biden-Trump debate.  But that was only after my late brother Dave texted me an oedipal description of the Republican standard bearer.  He was pretty non-political.  If Donald Trump could get that kind of rise out of my usually phlegmatic brother I figured I had better go see what the fuss was about.

Anyway, I remember the first time I ever saw Edwin Edwards.  It was back when he was a Congressman.  Before he had established a stranglehold on Louisiana state politics.  The chairman had asked for a roll call vote of the state delegations for some reason or another.  Edwards, resplendent in a gold blazer with fleur des lis festooned thereon, took the mic. 

“Le grande etat de Louisianne dit NON NON NON,” he thundered.  

I thought he was drunk.  In any event, I was pretty sure, judging from the raucous cheering behind him, that a good number of his fellow delegates were hammered.

Turns out that Edwin Edwards neither drank nor smoke.  He made up for these overtly abstemious attributes with a negotiable relationship with various other temptations.  And I will let it go at that.

I don’t know where to begin.  I won’t bore you with a factual recitation of his history.  You can go read any of a number of obits for that.  

Edwards wasn’t in office when I was at Tulane.  The governor during my tenure there was a Republican named Dave Treen of whom Edwards once said was so slow “it takes him an hour and a half to watch Sixty Minutes.” Actually Treen was nothing of the sort.  He made Moot Court and Law Review while at Tulane.  He also had a pretty good sense of humor.  He was once asked by some ole boy at a town hall if the State would add another month to the deer hunting season.  “What would we call it,”Treen replied. “Y’all already hunt 12 months a year.” 

Treen was the first Republican elected Governor since Reconstruction.   And, although nobody knew it at the time, he was the herald of Louisiana’s shift to becoming a red state.

Like I said earlier, I don’t know where to begin.  So I will just make an observation.  Edwin Edwards was the last of the old time populists in the tradition of the Kingfish and Uncle Earl.  Say what you will about the Longs and Edwards, and there is much to be said, they were “populists” is the sense that they believed in making Louisiana government work for the average guy.  Huey Long taxed the hell out of the oil companies from that revenue built roads and schools.  Earl Long continued the policies of his brother and was the first governor to put blacks in government.  Edwards’ core constituents were African-Americans and Cajuns.  He put blacks and women in important positions in state government.  He streamlined the bureaucracy and was a major force behind updating Louisiana’s Constitution.   

Did they take these solely actions out of the goodness of their hearts?  Of course not.  Each were ruthless in their pursuit of power.  None more so than Huey, who pretty much continued to run the State of Louisiana from his office in the US Senate while he plotted a run for the presidency. Indeed, he might have wound up in the Oval Office if he had not gotten himself shot during a visit to Baton Rouge.

And we have to be frank.  Edwin Edwards screwed up big time.  After his final turn in office, he got sloppy.  He also got caught on tape agreeing to a bribe in order to facilitate the grant of casino and hospital licenses in his capacity as a private attorney.  For this he got sent to Federal prison in his late seventies where to his everlasting credit he taught prisoners how to read and helped them attain their GEDs.  And typical Edwards, while in the joint he corresponded with a woman who eventually became his third wife and whom bore him a child in his eighties.

But let us now consider someone else who is occasionally referred to as a populist. Donald Trump is, was, a populist only in the sense that he has a feral ability to arouse the passion of a certain sector of the electorate that is either disaffected by politics and/or is fearful of its place in the changing demographics of the present age.  People that Donald Trump would otherwise have nothing to do with.  He is not motivated by anything other than his juvenile ego needs and toxic narcissism.   

Of Edwin Edwards, flawed as he was, we can say this.  He cared about Louisiana.  He, like the Longs before him, believed that the greater good was also politically expedient.

They were true populists.  And who knows when we will see their kind again. 

 

My Sunday Feeling

I’m wearing a mask again.  

Not everywhere.  But anywhere there is a crowd.  Like the grocery store or the baseball game.  Unlike well over 50% of my fellow Arkansans I’m completely vaccinated against COVID.  And based on my doctor’s advice I am also recently vaccinated against pneumonia.   So I’m pretty much good to go.  So why the mask?  Am I going to start knocking over liquor stores? Do I enjoy relative anonymity?

No.  I’m putting the mask back on because it’s not about me.  

Arkansas is pretty much setting the land speed record for spikes in the Delta Variant of the disease.  Am I returning to the mask because I’m afraid of catching it?  Not so much.  Certainly with asthma and coronary artery disease I sure don’t need it.  But if I were to catch it the odds are good that the symptoms would be relatively mild since I am vaccinated.  

But here’s the deal.  If I catch it, I could spread it to some Joe Blow at the Target store.  And this would not be good for him because the odds are, if Joe Blow is an Arkansan, he or she is likely to have not received the vaccine.  Especially if Joe Blow lives in a rural area.

For the life of me, I do not know how, to my mind at least, a public health crisis became politicized.  It seems pretty simple to me.  The stats show that the vast majority of COVID infections incur in people that are not vaccinated.  Unfortunately that holds true for those that die from COVID or COVID related complications as well.  Does the vaccine make you bulletproof and invisible?  Of course not.  But it sure increases your odds.

The vaccine is safe.  It is plentiful.  It is effective in preventing a fatal disease.  It is free.

I mean, c’mon.  

A lot of Arkansans would rather repose trust in advice from social media or jackleg preachers than people with actual expertise.  Like doctors. I’ve read various “arguments” against getting the shot.  The most recent, at least to me since I don’t spend a lot of time in Crazytown social media sites, is that the government’s vaccine program resembles the experiments performed by the Nazis on captive humans.  Some damned fool actually signed a pleading in the Houston Methodist case raising this argument which the judge rightfully rejected as “reprehensible.” As for me, there are two “N” words I never use.  “Nazi” is one of them.

But the lion’s share of the “arguments” against taking the shot center around some misguided notion of personal freedom that taking the shot would imperil. As someone put it the other day “the government doesn’t have an interest in my personal health.”

Which amusingly enough sounds like it’s in the same area code as the “pro choice” argument.  Which most folks making the argument in the context of mass inoculation of the populace- at least around here-could not possibly agree with.

The government has an interest in the public health.  The government has an interest in trying to keep this fire tamped down before we are back in lockdown mode.  The government has an interest in keeping the economy growing.  

And so yeah, it has an interest in your personal health to the extent that your health might be vital in stopping the spread of a deadly disease which has demonstrated downstream ramifications for all of us.  Why is this so hard for some people?

So I’m putting the mask back on in public as bad as I hate to.

Because it’s not about me.  And it’s not about you either.

It’s about all of us.

My Sunday 4th of July Feeling

 No blogging today.

Enjoy the holiday!