This is an incomplete compilation of things I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving Day. Each item will be written as a single sentence as an homage to the "In the News" front-page feature surviving from the bicentennial-celebrating Arkansas Gazette.
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• The publisher of this newspaper never sold it, but kept it uncommonly vibrant and tries now to save it into the digital age as a statewide source of reliable news by embarking on a bold and risky iPad delivery system.
• People are getting these iPads and, in many cases, liking them.
• People of a certain political persuasion seem to like these columns and implore me never to quit writing them because they are regularly assured in this space either that they are sane or that at least one other person is as insane as they.
• People of a certain countering persuasion hate this column and delight me with comical vitriol, frequently writing "your" for "you're," permitting me to correct them, while invariably beginning their assaults by stressing they never read this column and only accidentally saw the single offering that infuriated them into hateful spasm.
• Many readers of this column value words and have command of them and write to tell me that the Pegasus oil pipeline most certainly does not dissect the state from northwest to southwest but bisects it that way, because Arkansas is a state, not a frog.
• Asa Hutchinson is largely a pragmatic moderate as governor although he is offensively right-wing on two big and defining matters--throwing poor people off Medicaid on a bogus work requirement, and keeping the Little Rock schools under the thumb of state government control that has done these schools no good over five years.
• A young black man from southwest Little Rock who as a young adult never got north of Park Plaza is now the mayor of the city, nobly attempting to lead on the school issue and lunching on barbecue and greens at Sims in Little Rock with the billionaire former mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, who personally filed in the state as a presidential candidate, probably because he couldn't find anyone locally to do the paperwork for him.
• President Trump's approval-disapproval rating in the most recent University of Arkansas "Arkansas Poll" was 50-45, demonstrating that there is hope for 41/2 of every 10 Arkansans.
• The phrase "preposterous second-place and Russia-endorsed president" exists for the warmed hearts of these 4.5 in every 10 Arkansans and never fails to elicit Pavlovian resentment in the 5.5.
• "Trump derangement syndrome" also exists, referring to the facts that Trump is deranged and that some of us have come down with a patriotic syndrome in response to that.
• Smart and talented journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal toil tirelessly every day to inform us of at least some of the regular outrages committed by the preposterous and deranged president who verbally abuses them for their noble and vital work and riles his misbegotten disciples to do the same.
• The people of the state have been forced by traumatic experience to understand and accept that there is more to life, and more to feel good about, than University of Arkansas Razorback football.
• Streaming television services and apps present clear high-def images, offer abundances of viewing opportunities, permit binge-watching of a season's worth of episodes that can keep you up half the night and are, for the time being, less costly than other means of digital television viewing, even as Hulu goes up $10 a month, and not, I predict, for the last time.
• Roby Brock of Talk Business and Politics chats with me each Monday for a digital telecast/podcast that gently escorts into the new era of social-media technologies an old rascal who is in his 50th year of continuous Arkansas newspaper publication and will go on Social Security in four days.
• Republican operative and man-about-town Bill Vickery welcomes me from time to time to his "Sunday brunch" frat-boy radio show on 103.7, the Buzz, and introduces me to good music on the fade-ins and fade-outs while engaging me in conversations that surely irk his conservative base but consistently invoke favorable listener reactions in person and on social media.
• My mom, Fannie Ozella Bearden Brummett, the prettiest girl to come out of Howard County in the 20th century, is, while beset at 89 by steadily declining cognitive competence, into her fourth year of reliable care at a Michael Morton nursing home.
• The beagles Roscoe and Sophie ain't never caught a rabbit but are sure-enough friends of mine.
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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 11/28/2019