The old rascal Bubba McCoy has a decent-enough theory about state legislators and state legislation.
He shared it with me when I drove over to the car lot last week. I told him I couldn't stand another minute in Little Rock with the state Legislature meeting.
I told him even his company was an improvement.
"What're they doin' that's so bad?" he asked.
I told him the Legislature was standing up for slavery, denying tenants any rights, taking rights from women, threatening water supplies with hog excrement, planning to undercut further the Little Rock public schools and voting down a bill to enforce simple federal law that a man convicted of domestic violence couldn't buy a gun.
A legislator said guns don't hit people. People hit people.
"I don't know about any of that because I don't keep up with it because I don't care," Bubba said. "But I'm doubting they did exactly what you said. I think you have a habit of putting things in, oh, you know, the most damning way. It's the way you colyumists like to operate. It sells papers."
I wish.
I acknowledged engaging in maybe a little shorthand on a couple of those. A House committee voted down a bill to stop saying by statute that one of the stars on the state flag honored the Confederacy, which fought to protect slavery. And the bill on hog farms would move their regulation to a more obliging system in a way that the state's biggest and best water systems have called threatening to drinking water.
Just shortcuts, not misrepresentations, I said.
Bubba told me that, whether he agreed with my views on those or not, and that he probably didn't, the fact was that I'd be smart to pay no mind.
"The first thing is that none of that is going to affect you. You own your home, you don't rent. You don't own any rental property. You live in a neighborhood with no room for a hog farm even if somebody wanted to start one. And you're not a woman, just a wuss. And what was the other one?"
A star on the state flag, commemorating the Confederacy.
"Who cares?" he asked. "Did that star just now appear? Or has it been on there for quite some time? And were you able to get good nights of sleep during that time?"
Well, there also was the domestic batterer being able to buy a gun.
"And I'm gonna wager that you have managed to make it ... what now? 65 years?--without even once being shot by a guy who beat his wife."
I told Bubba that his was a selfish view. Public policy is about others not as fortunate.
"And every one of those things you mentioned is going to go to court before it gets to do anything to anybody," he said. "They can pass all the bills they want down there, but if one of them actually starts to hurt somebody, the whole thing is going to get settled in court. That's what you ought to write about--the judges, not the laws."
This was inspiring. Here was a good ol' boy from east Arkansas standing up for the courts and judicial review, whether he meant to be or not.
And another thing, Bubba said.
"Look at these people who get elected to go to Little Rock to be in the Legislature. Nary a one of them has anything actually important to do; otherwise they couldn't take off and go spend months on end strutting around Little Rock like they've got good sense.
"I couldn't do it. My business would die. These ol' boys would go without pickups. And you can't get from Point A to Point B over here without a pickup."
Bubba asked if I could take off months at a time.
I couldn't. If I don't write, I don't get paid. And if the paper survived three months without me, they might decide they could survive nine more.
"That's my point. Some people have stuff to do. The rest run for the Legislature."
I thanked Bubba for making me feel better, if irrelevant, a purveyor of material that ought to be ignored.
I asked if he'd watched the Razorback basketball team win that opener in the NIT the night before.
"Hell, no," he said.
His grandson--the dentist's and Yvonne's 20-year-old--had come over from Memphis and switched out Bubba from cable to some kind of Internet TV thing.
Bubba called it Rocko, but I suspect he meant Roku.
"The kid told me it was the savvy thing. He said it'd save me money," Bubba said. "But I haven't been able to find anything to watch since he left. I just pop around on movies I don't want to see. I can't even find the local news."
I asked why he cared. He said I had a point.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/24/2019