OPINION

OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: Bubba plays the boos

This time Bubba McCoy called me, rather than the usual other way around.

It was a recent Sunday morning, sometime between 9:30 and 10 a.m.

"Hey," he said, talking in a near-whisper. "I'm over here at breakfast and you just came up on the big TV screen. And everybody in here started booing you. I started to boo too, just to go with the crowd, but I held off."

Why would I be on the big screen?

"I don't know," he said. "It's one of them Sunday talk things."

Oh, sure. "Talk Business and Politics." I had recorded a visit with Roby Brock. And I'd spoken perhaps unflatteringly of Trump and Sarah and the state Legislature, though I seemed to remember mixing in objective analysis.

"Yeah, but they started hissing and saying 'get him off there' and 'turn that [bleep] off' when your mug came up, before you said a word."

I said I believed that could be called bias, booing a commentator before a commentator has commentated.

"Well, it could've been just that you're ugly," Bubba said.

"But they kept booing once you started talking."

Bubba said he thought maybe I needed to know that I was hated. I told him I'd been getting hints for four decades.

"Don't that bother you?"

I told him I was at that moment bothered by what he'd told me but figured the bother would go away in a matter of minutes with a little perspective, as it did.

Bubba asked, "In what possible way could you possibly be happy about getting booed by a full breakfast crowd?"

Happy wasn't the word. Accepting. Understanding. Those would be better.

Clearly, my political views are deeply unpopular in the state amid the new Trump chokehold. Often I write or comment that the element of the state's new conservatism that most distresses is evident heavily among white rural people.

I suspected Bubba was dining in a white rural crowd (which he confirmed, citing a couple of exceptions and saying my comment sounded racist, which it isn't, because demographic analysis is not racism).

Yes, often I perhaps insult many white rural voters by saying they are willfully misinformed. And political differences are currently more bitter and hostile than they've been in the modern time, owing to Trump and cable news and social media.

So, to that extent, being booed on the big screen was not surprising.

I would look on the bright side and carry the thought that at least those folks had been reading my column because otherwise they wouldn't have known to boo instinctively.

"That's maybe the biggest pile you've ever fed me," Bubba replied.

"You do call people over here stupid. You call me stupid. That's the whole reason you write about me--to make fun."

It most certainly is not. I have coined a word for Bubba--"rurale," pronounced "rur-al," with emphasis on the second syllable, as in Al as in Gore. It means possessed of a certain rural- based wisdom and sophistication, like "urbane," but with a different geography, more grit and less pretension.

"Maybe so," Bubba said, "but people over here think you've called them stupid or ignorant."

Stupid and ignorant are different, and those people are not stupid. And ignorance may not be the fairest assessment of the raging misinformation besetting an insular culture watching only Fox or Newsmax or listening only to the local evangelist preacher.

If you want to hear booing, I advised Bubba, just beam me up on the big screen on Sunday morning, not at the café, but at the church during the preaching.

And, by the way, why wasn't Bubba in church on Sunday morning?

"The missus is over in Memphis house-sitting the dental mansion," he said.

That would be the East Memphis home of Bubba's daughter and her dentist husband, who were, as Bubba put it, "off some damned place."

So, Bubba had opted out both on joining the house-sitting and going to church by himself, thus assuming temporary bachelorhood.

"I tried to figure out when I'd ever get a better chance to have biscuits and gravy and sausage. This could be the last one, for all I know.

"Then, lo and behold, you beamed in and 'bout near ruined everybody's appetite."

Did I ruin Bubba's?

"Oh, no. I just kept eating. I may have chewed a little faster because I couldn't hardly wait to call and tell you how beloved you are here in the hinterland."

Bubba said I ought to run for governor to try to set some kind of record for fewest votes. He said I'd get one vote in his county--his missus', not his.

Bubba is as over-married as I am.

By the way, while I had him, for whom did Bubba think he might vote in the next governor's race?

"Oh, I'm gonna vote for Sarah only for the chance to watch you implode on the big screen."


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.

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