Snow 101 for Southerners

As a person born and raised in the South who has been known to try to dig a car out of serious snow armed with nothing more than a metal kitchen spatula, I am the last to proclaim my expertise on winter weather. When it gets icy around here, I walk like an 80-year-old lady with a glass hip. I have been known to fall down stepping outside to get the newspaper. On more than one occasion I have gone skating with an enthusiastic beagle on the end of the leash--on my butt, and not by plan. So I offer these elementary survival skills to people currently living in the Deep South not as an expert, then, but as advice for my fellow Southerners who may be similarly weather-impaired. Hunker down, chilluns, and learn:

1. If by some chance you do find yourself behind the wheel driving on an icy surface, repeat these words: "I am skiing with my car!" It sounds weird, I know, but it gives you a certain jaunty insouciance when things start to go sideways--and believe me, that's the attitude of Yankee drivers who grew up driving on this stuff. "Oh, lookit that 18-wheeler go! Hey, did you watch the game last night?" Amateurs panic; seasoned snow drivers just enjoy the passing view. Jesus, take the wheel!

2. This is a 36- to 48-hour weather event, not the siege of Stalingrad. Southerners tend to get excited about snow, and in that excited state we are apt to start running around like chickens. Believe it or not, you will see your loved ones again, and chances are excellent that you have enough toilet paper to last two days. Leave the roads to those poor schmucks who absolutely have to be out there.

3. Essential tools: windshield scraper. Kitty litter or de-icer. Gloves. Car charger for your cellphone. Smartphone app for the insurance company. A pocket flask of Jack Daniels is a nice extra.

4. When the icy Armageddon has passed and you emerge from your cozy storm lair, clean off the top of your car. If it's snow, it will create a mini-blizzard once you get on the freeway, blinding the guy behind you--and if it's melted and then re-frozen, it either shakes loose in little shards, like shrapnel, or comes off in one big whoosh like a sheet of plate glass. This seems like a no-brainer to people who are used to this stuff, but not to residents of the Deep South who rarely encounter snow. A Deep South expatriate, I drove around obliviously spreading winter cheer every couple hundred feet for a couple of seasons before it was, ahem, forcefully explained to me that I was putting myself at risk of becoming a victim of justifiable homicide.

Finally, take pictures. Your great-grandchildren may want to see them someday: climatologists are saying that if global warming continues at its present rate, in 100 years ours may be a world without snow.

In Which the Scales Fall (Literally) From the Author's Eyes

Of late I have been noticing that a) my memory is not what it used to be and b) it was getting a whole lot harder to see. For a journalist, this is the old one-two punch: you squint to see where it is you parked the car, and then you have to think hard to remember what car you're driving these days. The memory thing I guess I can chalk up to Middle Age Brain, and I'm told that things actually improve after all the raging hormonal tides have ebbed, but the vision thing had to be dealt with, so I went to the eye doc. "Bad news," he said. "You are now so nearsighted that they don't make contact lens strong enough for you." (For vision wonks, we're talking about a minus 12 diopter; most nearsighted folks are a minus 6 or 7. For all you Spinal Tap fans, my vision impairment goes past 11.) "The good news," he continued, "is you have cataracts." Exactly how was this good news? "It means you can have cataract surgery and we can cure your nearsightedness." For a moment I thought I had misheard him. Cure, you said? "Cure," he said. This took a moment to sink in; then the next logical question occurred:  Well, why the hell didn't you tell me this years ago? "Because contact lens are a lot less expensive way to fix your vision than surgery," he said, "and Blue Cross wouldn't have paid for it."

Well, Blue Cross still doesn't completely pay for it, as it turns out. There are three levels of cataract surgery, and most insurers only cover what I will call the Honda Civic version. For me, that would have meant fixing my cataracts and my nearsightedness, but leaving me with my astigmatism, meaning I would still need contact lens/glasses for distance, plus reading glasses for near vision. Level Two, the Lexus version, cost an extra $1,900 per eye; that would correct my nearsightedness and the astigmatism. Level Three, the Mercedes Benz version, would do the whole shebang: it would correct my nearsightedness and my astigmatism and give me bifocal vision so that I would never need reading glasses, for a mere $2,900 per eye out of pocket.

On reflection, Level One seemed like a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach: undergo surgery but still need glasses? For the birds. Level Three seemed like a thrilling deal, until I thought about it. Problems with near vision (called "presbyopia") affect nearly everybody as we age, because the tiny little muscles in the iris that help change the eye's focus from distance to close vision age just like everything else, and get stiff and creaky. I asked the doctor: suppose I shelled out for those $2,900-per-eye set of new eyeballs--wouldn't those new lens still be at the service of those same old creaky eye muscles I have now? "Yeeessss," he allowed, with a small smile. "Which is why I don't always recommend that option to my patients. I don't really think they work all that well." Now he tells me. (Further proof that when it comes to health care in this country, the only traditional capitalist theory that applies is the Law of Caveat Emptor.)

Actually, the doc is a nice man, very kind, and on surgery day, when I was so nervous that my blood pressure was galloping way above the 100 level, he talked me through the whole thing. Well, almost the whole thing; for a crucial part of the festivities, I remember somebody mentioning I was about to get dose of something called Versed, and then it was nighty-night.

Now, two days later, I have a slightly swollen right eye that has perfect 20-20 vision--something I have not had since the day I exited my mother's womb. Got my astigmatism fixed, on the installment plan. ("If we don't pay," my husband asked, "do they come repossess your eyeball?") Colors look brighter. I see individual branches in trees two blocks away. The past two evenings, the winter sunsets have been glorious. In a week and a half, I get the other eye done. I cannot wait for the next warm, clear night, when I'm going to take a blanket outside, lie down on the lawn and look at the stars.

How 'Bout Them Stadiums!

I've been college-shopping with my daughter, who is very interested in Sweet Briar, a women's college in Virginia. Sweet Briar has a well-known horseback riding program with some of the most luxurious barns I've ever seen, and so I asked the dumb question parents are supposed to ask: are students expected to bring their own horse? (Because my daughter doesn't have one.) No, I was told--and the admissions person added something I found very interesting: the college has a rule that if you do bring your horse, you are automatically disqualified from getting any kind of financial aid--the thinking being that any student who can afford to keep her own private horse on the grounds at school should be able to foot the tuition bill by herself.

At this point, I decided I really, really liked Sweet Briar.

What does this have to do with the Braves leaving Atlanta? The new stadium is going to be built in Cobb County (where a lot of Braves fans now live, according to this interesting graphic in the Washington Post), and it's going to cost $672 million. The owners--a bunch of rich guys who include billionaire Ted Turner--are putting up something like $200 million of their own money, with the rest to be paid for by--you guessed it--the taxpayers. But that's okay! Because apparently this new stadium will create so many jobs in its new location that everybody will benefit. This is the huge whopper trotted out every time some sports mogul wants to build another palace, and it's especially effective in Atlanta, a real sports town which has always been The City Too Busy to Hate Money. Of course, the vast majority of the jobs created will be low- to medium-wage service sector jobs (somebody has to serve all those tables and sweep up all those empty beer cans)--and it goes without saying that a lot of the people who really could use jobs like that will be hard-pressed to get to this new stadium, because Cobb County is not connected to Atlanta's rapid rail system, known as MARTA. Back in the 1970s, it voted not to participate in MARTA, because at the time it was a white enclave and everybody knew that MARTA stood for Moving Africans Rapidly OuT of Atlanta. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Braves fans will continue getting to the games in their cars, further clogging roads in one of the most congested regions of one of the most congested cities in America. And isn't it weird, how easy it seems to be for these guys who own sports teams to get these tax breaks--especially in a region like Atlanta, where the average teacher makes $52,000 a year? Oh well, who cares. Their kids go to private schools.

I'm not singling Atlanta out here. Washington, D.C. recently made the Washington Nationals a very sweet deal, and Prince George's County bent over--well, I started to say backward, but let's just say bent over--for Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, so he'd build his new stadium there. The results are mixed: the Nationals ballpark is a great place and the surrounding area, formerly the Land of Blight, is indeed taking off--but it's two blocks from the nearest rapid rail station. Landover Field has made Dan Snyder a whole bunch of money, but it is nowhere near mass transit, and the only economic benefit to the surrounding neighborhoods is the kind you might realize with a bucket of soapy water and a squeegee. Wash your windshield, sir?

Two thoughts here. One: sports palaces without access to mass transit equal big money for fat cats and a rip off for the taxpayer. Two: taxpayers should demand that their government leaders adopt the Sweet Briar Rule: if you are rich enough to own a sports team, you are rich enough to pay for your own damn stadium.

CORRECTION: Ted Turner no longer owns any part of the Atlanta Braves. Today they are owned by Liberty Media, whose majority owner is some guy named John C. Malone.

Southernisms, Or: English as Your Second Language

Apropos of what I don't know, but The Business Insider has just come up with a list of 13 Southern sayings the rest of America won't understand, and I feel the need to weigh in, since articles like this give the impression that Southerners all talk alike. We don't. Southern, like any other language, has its regional idiosyncracies and variations. Feel free to peruse the full list, but for the benefit of future historians of the language, here are my footnotes.

"He could eat corn through a picket fence." This is one of the many reasons I love the South; where else on earth would you ever find such a concise and colorful description of a person with buck teeth? Says it all, doesn't it? Similarly, "grinning like a jackass eating briars" pretty much sums up the kind of phony smile you often see on the faces of TV preachers and politicians. I propose further that Southerners have the ability to come up with these gems on a moment's notice, a case in point being the time when I was a kid standing on a street in California watching the world go by with my dad, waiting for my mom to finish some shopping, and he said, "Lookit that girl. She's so knock-kneed her knees gotta signal to pass." You can't acquire this facility; I think it has to be genetic. Or something in the water (which, in my dad's case, would have been Gadsden, Alabama water.)

"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Honestly, I had no idea this was a Southern expression; I thought everybody knew it. I will admit that I used it the other day with my 16-year-old daughter, Maryland born and bred, and she looked at me like I had just put my panties on my head.

"He looked as drunk at Cooter Brown" and "I'm finer than frog hair split four ways." Just to emphasize that Southerners do not all go to secret meetings where we are given lists of expressions to memorize, these are two I've never heard. However, my grandmother used to say, when asked "How are you?" (supposedly the antecedent for the frog hair remark), "I'm large as life and twice as natural." I don't know what that means, but I've been saying it all my life.

"She's as happy as a dead pig in sunshine." The version I always heard left out the "dead," and I am wondering if the reporter of this piece either mis-heard or somebody was having a little fun at his expense. Because in my experience, a dead pig is not happy; a dead pig is pork chops.

"He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow." Nope, never heard that particular one, either; the version I grew up hearing was the description of some blowhard as "a rooster taking credit for the dawn."

"Catawampus." If this is a Southernism, then it is one that English-speaking people everywhere need. "The bow on the back of your dress is a little off-center" and "The bed looks wrong against that wall" and any number of other remarks could be more concisely rendered thusly: "That thing is all catawampus." I hope the OED folks are paying attention.

A Most Inconvenient Man

Oh, Tom Watson. Whatever shall we do with you?

Stuff you in a closet, apparently. That seems to be the approach being taken by the state of Georgia when it comes to a statue of the fiery turn-of-the-century politician and journalist which stands on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta. Actually, according to a spoikesman for Gov. Nathan Deal, the 12-foot statue will be moved to a nearby state-owned park.

To people who know who he was (hint: the Tom Watson we're talking about was not a professional golfer). Tom Watson's name is synonymous with "racist." He's best known as the firebrand who whipped up anti-Semitic passions during the Leo Frank case and helped incite Frank's infamous lynching. But he hated Catholics, too, and he was one of the most virulent bigots who ever wrote about African Americans in the South.

I remember coming across the Tom Watson statue years ago when I was a reporter in Atlanta and had to go down to the Capitol for something. At the time I wondered about the inscription, "a champion of right who never faltered in the cause." I had no idea of who he was, except for a vague sense that he'd been a bad guy; none of my school books had ever mentioned him. Years later, I picked up a used copy of C. Vann Woodward's classic biography, Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, and I learned about the first half of Watson's career, before he surrendered to the Dark Side.

That Tom Watson was a gifted orator and a lacerating critic of the railroad cabals who owned Georgia's government in the late 19th century. He was decades ahead of his time in advocating public ownership of the railroads and government delivery of mail to rural areas. He also opposed the convict lease system, in which prisoners (black, naturally) who had often been arrested on flimsy charges to begin with were "leased" out serve their sentences by working for state agencies or private companies owned by rich people who had pals in state government. This was the practice Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Blackmon later described so vividly in his book, Slavery By Another Name. It lasted up through World War II, and I remember finding vestiges of it in eastern Georgia--near Tom Watson's hometown of Thomson--when I was reporting there in the mid 1980s.

More than anything, though, Tom Watson was the guy who saw through the "let's you and him fight" tactics that have been used by economics elites in the South for the last 150 years to distract poor whites and poor blacks from realizing how much they are getting screwed. (Southern Republicans used a similar distraction technique to whip up anti-Obamacare sentiment: Forget about those record salaries of insurance and hospital CEOs or those record profits in the pharmaceutical  industry--the government's trying to pick your pocket!  "You are kept apart," Watson told integrated audiences of black and white farmers back when he was running for Congress in the 1880s, "that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings"--by banks which denied them credit for to buy seed, then evicted them from their homes when their crops failed. This bald statement of fact earned him the animus of Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady, that famous pro-business proponent of "The New South", who made sure that Watson's immensely popular speeches ran next to the truss ads on the back page, if they made the paper at all. As a Populist candidate for Congress in 1892, Watson was defeated by the pro-business Georgia Democratic Party machine in an election that his biographer, Woodward, called nothing less than "a farce"--full of voter intimidation, ballot box stuffing, bribery and the miraculous voter participation of small children and people who had been dead for years. The experience drove him out of politics. It made him mean and bitter. It made him into the twisted rabble-rouser he became.

Now the state of Georgia is going to "relocate" his statue somewhere as part of some renovation project. I am guessing it will wind up in a place where the only regular visitors will be winos and homeless people. In death, as in life, Tom Watson is an inconvenient reminder of a racist past a lot of Southern white people would like to bury, as well as economic realities a lot of rich people would rather the rest of us not think about. Southerners love their history, as long as it's not too inconvenient.