My Sunday Feeling

 As I have said before, I used to hang around in Jackson, Mississippi.  Had friends there, had occasional work there.  Met a girl there and we had this long distance thing going before it eventually went the way of all long distance things.  Or most of them anyway.

Jackson was a nice place in those days some 25 years ago.  Probably would not have taken too much for me to have moved there.

Thank God I did not.

My late law school classmate Hugh and his then wife lived in a country club neighborhood.  Hugh and I played many rounds of golf over at Colonial Country Club.  Pretty nice track.  Nothing great.  But pretty nice.  Hugh told me back then that the club was struggling financially.  It was having trouble retaining members and/or attracting new ones.  

Just like Jackson/Hinds County itself.  The Jackson metro area started experiencing membership retention issues (amongst the white members primarily) about that time.  Anyway, poor Hugh up and died in 2011.  Laura, his widow, sold the house and moved away about the time that the Colonial Country Club was being foreclosed on.  

As I recall, the property was bid in at foreclosure by a real estate developer who had great plans for the property as real estate developers tend to have.  The first plan was to bring in a golf course designer and revive the old course.  That didn’t work. The second plan was subdivide it and sell high end houses and rent high end apartments.  The property would be anchored by a shopping center.  

An apartment complex was built out there.  One of my friends that has remained in the area there says it is her understanding that the remaining property has pretty much gone to waste and is completely grown over. 

At this point Gentle Reader would be forgiven if s/he was wondering just where the heck I was going with this.  

Perhaps you have heard about Jackson’s water woes. I will not recount them here.  But last week they ran a story about a burst pipe that is spewing 60 million gallons of water a day.  A DAY.  And has for years.  Like since 2015. Now there is a Jim dandy sinkhole around the breach and a resultant pond about the size of a swimming pool.  

The area around the leak, if you want to refer to a 60 million gallon day geyser as a “leak” is guess where?  The old Colonial Country Club golf course.  

As best as I can tell it’s out around #4 on the old course/nature preserve.  

If you need a metaphor for incompetent city government you may look no further.

God knows the City of LIttle Rock is hardly a well oiled engine.  But it ain’t Jackson.

For example here are 2 small recent examples of what is like to live somewhere that is not a complete banana republic.  The city is repaving Kavanaugh Boulevard down below my house.  Kavanaugh is a major artery in town.  This job has been a major pain in the ass, with the smell of tar everywhere, closed off lanes and huge equipment blocking the road.  But guess what?  That’s planned maintenance.  They do not do that in Jackson.

Secondly, we lost power Friday night as a hot storm blew through. We reported the outage and the lights came on 2 hours later.  I cannot complain.  I would have no room to complain had they still been out Saturday morning seeing as how this storm was the same one that was to blow Rolling Fork, Mississippi off the map around 2 am that day.  We were merely inconvenienced.  We were lucky.

I don’t mean to suggest that Little Rock is Berlin.  But Little Rock basically works.  

And even when you consider the unused green space off Fair Park Boulevard that used to be a beloved golf course and is now mainly a monument to Frank Scott’s arrogance and hubris, you have to give him one thing.

It hasn’t leaked millions of gallons of water for damn near 10 years.  And Little Rock ain’t Jackson.

My Sunday Feeling

 “There are very few Lex Luthors out there.”

This is a quote from a friend of mine who is a Judge around these parts.  I forget the context in which it came up.  But it was at least a couple of weeks before Alex Murdaugh took the stand, allegedly in his defense,  in the double homicide case brought against him by the state of South Carolina.  

I thought of the Judge’s maxim as Murdaugh, his alibi blown to smithereens, proceeded to lie his way straight into 2 life sentences in the South Carolina state pen, a destination which will no doubt require an adjustment on his part, having lived a life of riches (or more accurately an abundant line of credit) and privilege up until this point in time.  To be fair, he has already gotten a taste of his new lifestyle, having spent the last year behind bars awaiting his trial date. But you get my larger point.  Murdaugh doesn’t fit the usual profile of a guy in the joint.  Which may make his tenure there somewhat problematic.

It must really suck to be him now.  Two consecutive life sentences.  That first sentence could end next week if he runs across the right con in the exercise yard.  That second one will be a bitch to serve.

But, to paraphrase something my dad used to tell me, he has only himself to blame.

I assume, gentle reader, that you are basically conversant with the facts.  Forget about the lying for a minute.  Here’s how fucked up all this is.  As I told the Deacon around Wednesday of last week, “Sure he is  a liar and a thief who was about to get exposed to the world as such during discovery in his son’s wrongful death case.  So he blows his wife and Paul to Kingdom Come to buy him time to come up with some money?  That makes no sense.”

His able defense attorney, who did a pretty good job of spinning straw into gold, even threw that one out there for the jury to consider.  Why would Murdaugh  do that?  It makes no sense.

And yet that is what he did.  When confronted with a money problem, albeit a pretty stiff one, he blew away Mags and Paw-Paw.

There once was a time where there very much was a Gothic South.  A South where the likes of Faulkner, Miss Eudora, Williams and McCullars walked alongside the authors of the King James Bible.  In that world, certain families pretty much ran things in their particular locales.  Arkansas really didn’t have many  cities or counties that were “ran” by a person or family.  Sheriff Marlin Hawkins in Conway County comes to mind along with Robert E. Lee Wilson of Wilson, Arkansas.  

One of my buddies and I were discussing this the other day.  I think it would be harder to be “the boss” of a county or city now.  In the first place, and boy did Murdaugh discover this to his torment, there’s too many cameras, too many tracking devices, out there even in the country.  (Note to self: Before attempting a major crime turn off On-Star.).  Secondly most of the old cracker types that used to populate the rural south, the ones that Faulkner knew so well, have died off and their offspring have left.

Still, as was pointed out to a fare-the-well by the media last week, Alex Murdaugh came from a long line of lawyers, judges and prosecutors in the low country judicial district that eventually put him in the dock.  No doubt, the Murdaughs historically have cut a lot of ice in Colleton County.  And yet, in an interview with the former US Attorney for the District of South Carolina during the Obama Administration, he implored the media to quit referring to the Murdaughs as “prominent.” He basically said that they were nobody outside of Colleton. 

Still it’s a long way from the yacht club and Gamecocks baseball to getting away with murder.  Are narcissism, privilege and a“big fish in small pond”sense of historical entitlement sufficient to make a good ole boy like Alex Murdaugh into a master criminal, at least in his own mind?  Who thinks like this?

I’m with his lawyer.  It makes no sense.  

But it proves the Judge’s maxim in spades.  

Because Alex Murdaugh sure as hell ain’t no Lex Luthor.