One does not wish to politicize this unique and richly traditional American holiday.
Yet one must acknowledge ever so meekly that one finds oneself most thankful this Thanksgiving Day for the following blessings, in ascending order of gratitude's depth:
• The Razorback football defense.
• Mom's fluffy, moist and sage-enriched cornbread dressing, steaming from the inside on the first scoop.
• Barack Obama's economic recovery.
To begin: Yes, one must readily acknowledge behaving as quite the front-runner where the football Hogs are concerned.
But being a front-runner is what sports fandom is all about. Its essence is reaping vicarious glory from victory and exercising the right to whine in defeat.
This column's consistent position long has been--from essays written in the late 1980s--that it is permissible for an institution of higher learning to overemphasize football only so long as its football team wins and produces statewide glee.
A 100-yard interception return is worth a great deal of misplaced priority.
Overemphasizing football for 3-9 and 4-8 seasons and motorcycle wrecks and other coaching debacles is simply pitiable. You wind up with the worst of both worlds--a bad state and a bad team. They would not put up with such things in Alabama, where they keep the state bad and the team good. Nor should we.
As was explained a couple of weeks ago in an online-only column that print-only readers tragically missed, a state's collegiate football performance tends to improve as its politics get worse.
That prediction, one must meekly and modestly submit, was dead-on. Since the day it was offered, two thoroughly inferior jurisdictions for public policy, Louisiana and Mississippi, have been held scoreless in football by the team representing the newest public policy wasteland that is our beloved Arkansas.
So our football future in Arkansas is indeed very bright. Regressive public policy and a national collegiate football championship appear on our horizon, thanks to the winning combination of Bret Bielema at the football helm and Leslie Rutledge at the attorney general's helm.
The haters surely were in agreement on aforementioned rankings of cornbread dressing and the Hog defense. We all share great delight in anticipating that Friday promises a leftover helping of the former while we rejoice in the televised image of the mad pursuit of Missouri Tigers by the latter. It will make for one of the year's better days.
But then the haters' scoffing could be heard for miles around. Why, the very idea that this disgrace of a president has overseen a recovery in a nation he has very nearly ruined ...
The haters credit other nonpolitical factors--other non-Obama factors -- for an unemployment rate at its lowest since July 2008; for gasoline prices at a four-year low; for a stock market tripled in value since Obama inherited the Republican crash; for a federal budget deficit reduced by nearly a trillion dollars a year since Obama had no choice but to run it up with a stimulus package to put a floor under the Republican collapse; for refinanced mortgages at 3 and 4 percent to keep Americans in homes more affordably rather than on the street where the Republican subprime lending scandal left them, and for health-insurance expansion that has saved rural hospitals in Arkansas and put more than 200,000 poor Arkansans into the private insurance market in a way that has held down premiums for everyone and fortified an otherwise stressed state government budget.
The haters will insist that the president deserves no credit for these successes although he would warrant full blame if they had not occurred. For that right to contradict laughably, one must give thanks this day.
Finally, one wishes to give special thanks on this holiday for the unreliable conservatism of this fine newspaper's editorial page.
That conservatism was quite reliable, actually, in the exclusive formal endorsement of woeful Republican after woeful Republican in the recent election.
But perhaps the intended higher design was better football.
Meantime, the editorial Sunday--praising the compassion and eloquence and greater American welcoming spirit of this president in his extending by executive order a reprieve from harassment to certain undocumented residents of this country--was worth the bargain price of a subscription.
It's as welcome as the occasional subtle hint in this space that Asa Hutchinson actually may not perform all that dreadfully as governor.
Let's hope he can at least be bad enough to keep the football team winning. Leslie Rutledge might be able to do that all by herself, but we need insurance.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/27/2014