Let the games begin. Or rather continue. For this is just what Hillary Clinton, back when she was Hillary Rodham Clinton, warned against when the bright idea first surfaced of having the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsor a series of confabs across the state to let us peons, aka We the People, partake of federal largesse. She knew then that whoever accepted Caesar's coin would soon enough be accepting his rules and regs. But now our governor and congressional delegation act so . . . surprised when that old, old pattern surfaces still again. As if, like Rip Van Winkle, they'd fallen asleep for a couple of decades. Well, it's time to wake up and smell the cannabis.
Listen to Bruce Westerman, who's not a state but federal representative: "We've got a $19 trillion debt, we've got national security issues, and this is what they double down on? Sending high school boys into the same bathrooms as high school girls?" But who says the law can't be as capricious as it is incoherent? Pity the state's poor school boards, so full of good intentions. But we all know what the road to hell is paved with, or should by now.
Onward and downward into the Valley of No Surprises, its floor littered with the skeletal remains of cattle that never made it across. Its insignia is the skull and crossbones, its flag that of the pirate ships that, like the Flying Dutchman, were doomed to sail on forever in some great Sargasso Sea of half-forgotten memories.
Those memories may haunt, but they never seem to change. Indelible as J. William Fulbright's signature on the Southern Manifesto, they tarry. For we can do nothing to change what we have done except forever regret it. A general named Lee warned us that regret is the most wasted of human emotions, yet we can't seem to avoid it. If only there were a way to sum up our dream of cradle-to-grave security as eloquently and concisely as the author of a roadside sign for his eatery in Belzoni, Miss., did: "Sno-Cones, Fireworks and Gravestones."
Multipurposing, it turns out, is the death of concentration. Over in nearby Greenwood, Miss., a separate-but-equal genius has summed up his whole business in just a few words: "Beauty Salon, Bail Bonding, Bridal Boutique." We can't help but be mesmerized, mouths agape, as we are reduced to just staring. And wondering what our ruling class will come up with next. Whatever it is, we're agin it, as we are by treacherous modernity itself.
Editorial on 05/20/2016