The times, they aren't just a-changin', they done changed. And so has Arkansas as the state's center of gravity--economic, political, and cultural--shifts to the northwest. You can sense it in the business news, in the decennial census and the legislative redistricting based on it. And soon enough it'll be reflected in our language as Mountain South begins to displace Delta South as Arkansas' lingua franca.
A whole culture can shift just as its geography and demography do. Notice more bluegrass at political rallies these days, less blues? Soon there'll be a lot more mariachi bands, too. Or as John Shelton Reed, the De Tocqueville of Dixie, replied when asked how to anticipate the Future of the South: "¡Estudia español!"
The surest guide to Southernness remains mean elevation above sea level. The lower, the more Southern. But some of us get the sinking feeling that the whole state is slowly shifting upland, north by northwest, as if Arkansas' culture were a tectonic plate moving, however imperceptively, under our feet.
Kansas seems to grow closer, Louisiana more distant. Our tastes reflect it. Tabasco makes way for KC barbecue sauce. Even our taste in sages begins to change. William Allen White of the old Emporia (Kan.) Gazette succeeds H.L. Mencken of the old Baltimore (Md.) Sun as our journalistic model. Flash gives way to deliberation, the rhetorical capework of Arkansas' personification of populism--Jeff Davis--to the lemon-sour wit of Bob Dole.
To call Bob Dole's sense of humor only wry would be like describing the taste of an unripe persimmon as just a mite bitter. Spotting three former presidents--Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon--on some ceremonial occasion, Senator Dole observed, "There go See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil."
Not for Bob Dole the politician's fixed smile and faux cheeriness. Which may be what made him such a relief in these all too blow-dried, PR-scripted, and generally cosmeticized times.
There are fashions in language, too. And like fashion, language never stands still, and that includes invective. The other day, one of our valued contributors to the Letters to the Editor column spoke of Tom Cotton as a "dyspeptic Schlafly-ian Manchurian Candidate arriviste," managing to sound more like Wm. F. Buckley of Yale than a master of the Southern invective like (Uncle) Earl K. Long down Louisiana way. There's no point in trying to decide which style is the more eloquent. It's enough to note the difference, and the cultural marker that difference provides.
Those of us with more Southern proclivities may miss the old stem-winders of Southern politics, but their time has come and gone with the wind--and with Uncle Earl himself, the most entertaining and insightful Long since Huey. The first time I saw him in rhetorical action was on a cotton-loading platform at little Plain Dealing, La., and it was a performance to remember. He had a marvelous time putting city slickers in their (low) place, including a mayor of New Orleans who once had the misfortune of running against him and, as if that weren't burden enough, had been saddled with a top-hatted name (DeLesseps S. Morrison) made for the society pages.
By the time Earl Long was through with him, the good mayor was a figure of fun in both upstate Louisiana, which includes everything in the piney woods north of Alec, and down in the bayous, where Cajun remains the dominant persuasion. Down there, where the music is toe-tappin' zydeco, and the food'll make you want to slap your grandmaw, an upscale mayor of N'awlins wasn't about to pass as anything but an irredeemable city slicker. Talk about the worst of both (Protestant and Catholic) worlds, Chep Morrison may have carried the Garden District that year. And that was about all.
Uncle Earl had a marvelous time with Mayor Morrison's "little toupy" and fatal reputation as a reformer--a dreaded tag in fun-loving, story-telling, vote-stealing, graft-soaked Louisiana politics. To quote a political sage named Dorothy, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
To top it off, Uncle Earl had made sure to line up a gen-u-wine Frenchman as his running mate. ("And first I want to introduce to you the man I have selected to serve under me as Lieutenant Governor during my next term of office--a fine Frenchman, a fine Catholic, the father of 23 children, Mr. Oscar Guidry.") As a small factual matter, Mr. Guidry had only 14 children, a slight deficit in the fatherhood department, but Uncle Earl, never one to be taken aback, took the correction in stride. ("Oscar says he has only 14 children, but that's a good beginnin'.") That was Louisiana politics back then, and may still be in the era of Edwin Edwards, the most lovable scamp since, yes, Uncle Earl.
These days a lot of questions have arisen about the accuracy and privacy of voting machines, and one state after another has abandoned them and gone back to old-fashioned paper ballots. None of that would have surprised Uncle Earl; back in their infancy, he was asked if these new-fangled machines meant the end of ballot-box stuffing and a new dawn of clean elections--even in Louisiana. His reply, in toto: "Da votin' machines won't hold me up. If I have da raight commissioners, I can make dem machines play 'Home Sweet Home.' "
The late great A.J. Liebling, legendary newspaperman and trencherman out of New York City, came down to the Vieux Carre that year to scoff at the political eccentricities of the Gret Stet of Looziana, and stayed to praise them. First he fell in love with the food ("By the time we sat down to dinner in New Orleans--three dozen [oysters] apiece at Felix's and then shrimp and crabmeat Arnaud and red snapper en court bouillon . . .") and then the people and politics and patois.
No wonder that, by the time his all too short visit had ended, Mr. Liebling was ready to proclaim Earl Kemp Long his favorite American statesman. Even though a proper New Orleans society lady he met at a formal dinner, as he put it with his master's touch, "professed not to be able to believe me." But anyone who's a sucker for language in all its infinite variety would.
Out of his sojourn in bayou country came Liebling's masterwork, The Earl of Louisiana. The spirit of Uncle Earl--and his language--permeates every page. Some of us in Arkansas are going to miss not being quite as Southern as we once were, which is why language, like faith, needs regular revivals. The South will rise again--though we might not recognize it by then.
Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at:
pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 11/16/2014