You Can Never Go Home Again

Last week on the Redneck Riviera

My extended family had a good life and made a pretty good living on the U.S. Gulf Coast. My cousins had shipyards in Orange and Gulf Shores. An uncle ran an offshore drilling rig and my brother had a bar in Gulf Port and a restaurant in Beaumont. My family tore all up and down America's third coast making and losing very small fortunes and having a blast. I lived in the South most of my life until ten years ago. I'm probably not going back.

I've lived all over and can report with some confidence that idiots, despite perceptions and opinions, are pretty evenly disbursed across the country. So why the disparity? How did the idiots in Dixie beat the numskulls in Vermont in the COVID-19 stupidity sweepstakes?

Meanwhile...down the street at Toothless General

Anyone who pretends not to know the answer to that question is either being coy or is one of those idiots. Or works for the Internet Research Agency. 

The orange tinted creep show that Southerners elected to the presidency is still (eight months on) killing them in record numbers. Many are still waiting on COVID-19 to "magically go away in April"

Until whatever April that is rolls around (23? 24?) - the MAGAs will be dancing on tables and avoiding masks and vaccines. And dying.

It's not like this is a new idea. The #eatdrinkandbemerry thing always plays well during plagues. I'm staying away from the South. Tequila shots and table dancing just aren't that important to me anymore - and vaccines and masks beat what I've seen of the COVID ward videos.

In large part because of the indulgence of the people of the South, their wisdom in putting a mad man in charge, this twenty months have seen a regular a Book of Revelation shit-show writ small. Stir in the California fires and its almost enough to move an atheist to prayer.

I'm leaving Hawaii sometime next year and was thinking of returning to my home lands in the South to finish out what is hopefully the balance of my long and happy life.  But somehow, adding "flamboyant death wish" to the other revered  traditions I would be exposed to down there -  like General Sherman Statues and Southern Baptists - is probably a bridge to far.

Being a Southerner, I know they'll surely appreciate the fact a guy like me has decided to stay away.

It's a sad thing.  A very sad thing. 

May God help my redneck brethren, Trump surely isn't going to.

***

But my feet are getting itchy and I can hear a song forming in my mind....

Nevada, Blue Nevada  

Something like that.

Even though I'm a tax guy, my son-in-law had to remind me recently that Nevada didn't have an income tax. Neither does Texas, but those COVID-19 bills can be ... murder.