Blog 291 – 05.11.2016

This is the first work assignment I have had down South in quite sometime. I was born and grew up in Chattanooga about one hundred and fifty miles or a little over two hours drive to the north east. I cannot think of Alabama without hearing Forest Gump in my head saying to Jenny when she is about to board the bus back to San Francisco from our Nation’s Capital, “I think you ought to go back to Green Bow, Alabama.” The movie plays tribute to the great state of Alabama in many ways most obvious when Jenny and Forest are dancing in his home to the song, “Sweet Home Alabama.”

I have had the privilege in my travels to have been in all fifty of the United States and eleven other countries. I can honestly say they were all of them beautiful with much to recommend them, even Vietnam, and I say even because when I was in South Vietnam there was a war with the North. Come to think of it when I was born in Tennessee and traveled growing up to nearby Georgia and Alabama I got the distinct impression that we were still at war with the North. There are even yet canon and stacks of cannon balls and war monuments all over the city of my birth and every spring just south of Chattanooga in Georgia’s Chickamauga Battlefield the park is alive with re-enactors fighting old battles again for the umpteenth time, like a sort or dress rehearsal for a new rebellion.

I have lived and worked mostly in Indiana and Illinois for the last couple of years. Both of those states have a special claim on Abraham Lincoln. Neither Lincoln nor John Kennedy were popular in the South and in fact were both reported to have been slain by Southerners. I love the movie Abraham Lincoln, The Vampire Slayer. Some people think it fiction but it is the most plausible theory I have heard yet to explain how rich southern plantation owners could convince poor white southerners to fight so they could keep their slaves and maintain a society of haves and have nots that was the true ole South not the romanticized Gone With The Wind version. Vampires hypnotizing those poor southern boys so they could continue to grow their own food supply, the blood sucking bastards, I mean the courtly gentlemen of the South. And I thought Lincoln was a great President before I knew he was also a kick-ass Vampire Slayer .

While in Crawfordsville, Indiana I picked up a wonderful Lincoln Tee Shirt that is black with a silver image of Lincoln poising like in the Lincoln Memorial only holding a basket ball hoop (That’s right, Ted Cruz, a hoop) in his left hand and dribbling a basket ball with his right foot. What a guy, keeps the country together through a terrible civil war, slays vampires on the side, and turns out he’s one fine basket baller too.

But Alabama is more of a football state. “Run, Forest, Run. Stop, Forest, Stop.” I see signs the war between the states is running out of steam, as is the war between the races, and even the war between the sexes. Gosh, even a majority now believe people have a right to love whomever they wish and even marry whomever they wish. And someone wants to make America great again or is it really a really a rich Vampire (ten times a billionaire) trying hypnotize poor folks again to keep the rich sucking the blood of the poor. Maybe he has missed the make America great train because it has already left the station, “People all over the world, join hands. There’s a love train, love train.”

They shot Lincoln, and Kennedy but you cannot bury the truth that one nation with liberty and justice for all shall not perish from the earth. If the United States of America will not do it another nation will rise up to do it in our place. Keep, not make, America great by putting a woman in her place, in the house, The White House. (The opinions expressed are my own and do not in any was constitute an endorsement by or for the great state of Alabama.)

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White