I was taping an interview with Dennis Miller when the story broke.

The two-segment interview aired yesterday on the Dennis Miller Show. This is the second time I’ve appeared on the show and, as you can hear by clicking here — 082012_MILLER_THOMPSON — though we sometimes occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, I think we do enjoy each other’s company.

The link above is to an MP3 file. It takes a minute or so to load but be patient, it’ll get there.

Dennis was a great supporter of To Hellholes and Back and I really appreciate him being one of the first radio hosts to have me on his show.

Check out more Dennis Miller here: http://www.dennismillerradio.com/

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I shot both a couple weeks ago during a four-day kayak trip through Glacier Bay National Park with my longtime hiking/camping pal and pro photog and game tracker extraordinaire Pat Costello.

Pat is one of the best outdoor photographers in Alaska. If you want to see a whole gallery of shots he took from our trip—which was a great way to prep for the Better Off Without ‘Em book promo and short tour later this summer—check out his Juneau Photos Facebook page.

Everyone has seen photos and video of bears hanging out in streams and rivers munching down on spawning salmon.

But until this trip I’d never known that wolves do the same thing.

Makes sense. Wolves are carnivores (omnivores according to some) and will eat pretty much whatever they can get their paws on.

Still, hanging out on a hillside in Southeast and getting a chance to watch wolves fishing—and interacting with bears invading their turf—was a rare and thrilling experience.

Here’s a brown bear with a pair of cubs in the same stream.

In this one the mama bear gives full-on chase down the stream and eventually catches up with a very speedy fish.

Look closely at the water just a few feet ahead of the charging bruin and you can actually see the fish zipping through the water as it attempts to elude the pursuing bear.

Just watching a bear hauling ass after prey like this at close range was intimidating. Glad we weren’t the ones being charged.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufiJxbhysWs

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This season’s game will be played in Miami on January 7, 2013, between the SEC champion and another team, very possibly one from the SEC, as was the case in 2012.

Slavishly following the directive laid out in spring by ESPN (“LSU faces smooth road to title game”), the recently released USA Today coaches poll has SEC teams occupying the top two spots (LSU, Alabama) and includes five SEC teams in the top ten and seven (more than half the conference) in the top 25.

The all-important “strength of schedule” title thus gift-wrapped, the SEC’s seventh-straight title shot is virtually guaranteed before a single ball has been snapped or groin muscle pulled.

Once again, it’s the SEC vs. the field.

Here’s how the game is fixed

For those who still haven’t figured out what goes on behind the smoke and mirrors, the BCS/ESPN business plan works like this: preseason rankings, which function like pole positions in an auto race, typically include three or four or five SEC teams among the nation’s top ten, more than from any other conference.

This year is the snoozy rerun that proves the rule.

From the outset, this bias for SEC teams builds into the system a near insurmountable advantage.

Start the season with two of the top four teams from the SEC, as was the case in 2010 with Alabama and Florida, and in 2011 with Alabama and LSU, and the conference is virtually guaranteed to be represented in the title game—and this is an important point—even if neither of those two schools end up winning the conference.

To be the best, so goes to the old sports adage, you’ve got to beat the best.

But since only SEC teams are consistently declared the best, only SEC teams get the chance to prove themselves against “the best.”

It’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Does the SEC get favorable rankings because they’re so good? Or is the SEC so good because they get favorable rankings? I argue for the latter.

In 2010, for example, the Auburn Tigers began the season with a consensus ranking of #23, behind SEC rivals Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia.

The only way a team regarded so lightly early in the season can possibly climb into the national championship game—which Auburn did that year—is to beat a slew of highly ranked opponents, which Auburn also did that year.

Because polls are pre-arranged so that SEC teams will face the most highly ranked opponents over the course of a season—in the jargon of the BCS this is called “strength of schedule”—only teams from the SEC are time and again able to manage this feat.

Why the SEC always comes out on top

ESPN, of course, is the commercial entity that dominates the college football landscape and has a near incalculable economic interest in promoting the nationwide perception of the SEC’s elite status.

Actually, you can calculate that interest.

In 2008, ESPN and the SEC signed a fifteen-year, $2.25 billion agreement allowing the Worldwide Leader in Sports to televise the conference’s football games.

In addition, ESPN owns the rights to televise all BCS games, including the national championship game.

In 2011-2012, ESPN and its partner ABC broadcast 33 of the 35 college bowl games. Which is to say that for all intents and purposes ESPN, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, the most successful spinner of dreams and fables in world history (not counting the Republican Party) owns college football as a commercial entity.

Think about it this way—if you’d invested $2.25 billion in a commercial enterprise, would you just sit back and “hope” the chips fell your way each year? Would you just place your bet with the sports book and pray that your side covered the spread?

Or would you—as a prudent businessperson—take every step you possibly could to ensure that your investment paid off?

You’d be an idiot not to do the latter—or believe that people who deal in billions of dollars don’t know how to guarantee that their investments pay out.

So go ahead and cheer for your teams this year—I’ll cheer for mine. So long as these bullshit rankings are based on multi-national corporate investment strategies, however, please don’t try telling me anyone knows for certain which teams and conferences are the best in the nation.

Oh, and by the way, spare me the “SEC is the toughest conference top to bottom” bluster. For God’s sake, it’s tougher to go undefeated in the Colonial Athletic Association than it is to run the table in the SEC. That putative miracle has been pulled off for the last four straight seasons.

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Kirkus Reviews calls the book “often thoughtful, always irreverent” and “a raucous road trip through the South with a funny, informed, sardonic and opinionated Yankee.”

Kirkus full review here.

Publishers Weekly calls the book “hilariously over-the-top” and “thought-provoking.”

Publishers Weekly full review here.

The July/August issue of Washington Monthly magazine includes a lengthy essay review by Colin Woodard, U.S. social history authority and author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

Woodard calls Better Off Without ’Em “viciously funny” before dissecting—and disagreeing with—the book’s central call for a peaceful/friendly secession. It’s an interesting, thoughtful review, an engaging counterpoint to the book.

Washington Monthly full review here.

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We’ve seen this kind of southern ecumenical opprobrium before—most recently in Pike County, Kentucky, where the Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church voted to ban interracial couples from joining the congregation in 2011.

And who can forget the 2009 case of the Louisiana justice of the peace who refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple?

The familiar display of good ol’ rebel racism in the Mississippi capitol was nothing new.

The real lesson there comes from the invisibly potent forces of denial and enabling, the twin pathologies that ensure that offenses like this keep happening, and will keep happening, in the pious Confederacy.

Witness the supposed outrage from the “good” members of the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs upon hearing the news that those poor black folk had been trundled off to exchange their sacred vows elsewhere.

“This is a small, small group of people who made a terrible decision,” church member Casey Kitchens told The Clarion-Ledger newspaper, and reported by the AP. “I’m just ashamed right now that my church would do that. … How unfair. How unjust.”

Caterwauled another: “I blame the first Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, I blame those members who knew and call themselves Christians and didn’t stand up.”

And of course Mississippi Baptist Convention executive director Reverend Jim Frutal raised himself to a full and upright position while reassuring the media that the episode was “not reflective of the spirit of the Lord and Mississippi Baptists.”

Someone please wake me when this rerun is over.

Don’t look at me, I didn’t do nuthin’

During my two years of research for Better Off Without ’Em, I heard just this sort of denial of culpability restated over and over again.

Talk with southerners about social issues and, while acknowledging the heavy burden of problems such as racism and religious intolerance, to a man, woman, and gun-toting child they’ll insist that they themselves do not embody those predictable characteristics and behaviors often used to portray the less attractive side of Dixie.

We aren’t crazy religious—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who you’re thinking of.

We aren’t racist—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who have a problem.

We aren’t single-issue abortion voters or the ones who have a problem with gays—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who the media unfairly fixates on and uses to vilify the rest of us.

All of these statements may be true. The majority of southerners are not loud-mouthed, uneducated, redneck fuckwits flying Confederate flags from the backs of their KIA and Mercedes lynch wagons.

To what extent they were ever true many of these notions are comically outdated.

What the majority of southerners are, and have always been, however, is willing to allow the most strident, mouth-breathing “patriotic” firebrands among them to remain in control of their states’ most powerful and influential positions, be they in the realms of politics, business, education, or religion.

Just as it was southern zealots who pushed the country into the Civil War, it was southern zealots who, while the rest of the South turned its back, were allowed to construct and maintain the legal foundations of Jim Crow; who were allowed to turn the Scopes Monkey Trial into a humiliating circus; who were allowed to circumvent Brown vs. Board of Education and school desegregation by calling out the National Guard and building segregation “academies”; who were allowed to resist Civil Rights with dogs and water cannons; who are still allowed to sidestep equitable school funding and proclaim without ridicule that a black president’s birth certificate is fake and throw secessionist balls and insist that slavery had nothing whatsoever to do with the Civil War, and swear that all of this was and is somehow being done in the name of a liberty to which they feel deprived due to their miserable lives of oppression and persecution beneath the stars and stripes.

Maybe the fanatics do represent a minority of southerners.

That’s still an extremely powerful group that the rest of the South enables—or succumbs to—or aligns with—or votes for—or prays alongside—year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

Theirs are the voices that perpetuate the agenda because theirs are the voices that ring with the most sincerity, that are most bereft of apology, that in their bellicosity resonate as the most historically and authentically “southern.”

As Jackson teaches us again this week, if there’s one thing about the South that hasn’t ever changed it’s the hypnotic influence of the crusader and zealot.

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Hodges (who looks like someone’s sweet, peach-cobbler-baking mom, btw), had been super keen on the idea until a Muslim school applied to be part of the program.

That’s when she went all Deuteronomy on school vouchers.

Her freakout after learning that the sacred freedom-of-religion guarantee in the Constitution extends to all religious groups, not just the televised KKKristian kind, led Hodges down the worn path of southern political hyperbole—what we all here in the North call “bald-faced lying.”

Lied Hodges to local media: “There are a thousand Muslin schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana … We need to insure that [the voucher program] does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools.

“I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools.”

Deadpanned the Livingston Parish News: “Hodges mistakenly assumed that ‘religious’ meant ‘Christian.’

Hodges not walking alone down that beach

If you think this sort of “The Muslims are Coming!” Dollar Store dumbfuckery is limited to one crazy, majority-elected lady in some backwater bayou fuckhole who can’t spell her own first name right, you might check out the Religion chapter in Better Off Without ’Em (which comes out August 14).

In that chapter, I recount sitting in a completely unexceptional Wednesday night Baptist service during which a preacher warned an aghast congregation that six new Muslim mosques were being built right here in Mobile, Alabama, for the express purpose of announcing Islam’s victory in its war to conquer America.

The six mosques of Mobile were phantoms (lies), just as Hodges’ “a thousand Muslim schools” in Louisiana are phantoms (lies).

The weird thing? Hodges is absolutely right!

But here’s the really crazy part—I actually agree 100 percent with Representative Hodges and her paranoid southern brethren!

Like her, I don’t think taxpayer money should be used to support or promote a batshit nuts religion like Islam.

That’s a redistribution of wealth that makes Obamacare look downright Reaganesque.

Of course, I don’t think taxpayer money should be used to promote the “private” functions of Born Again radicals, either, any more than it should be funneled to the Mormons (enough money already), Scientologists (not till we see some hard evidence of our alien overlords), Catholics (what, for more Sanduskian cover-ups?) or any other faith-based operation.

It’s called freedom of religion, not free money for religion.

What Better Off Without ’Em really means

This is what a lot of people don’t and probably won’t understand about Better Off Without ’Em—that the phrase cuts both ways, that both sides of the debate actually agree on the fundamental principles, even if for completely different reasons.

That I’m just as sick of the tyranny of morons and assholes and borderline seditionists imperiling the future of “my” country as southerners like Valarie Hodges are sick of the tyranny of morons and assholes and borderline seditionists imperiling the future of “their” country.

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Those who might consider this decade-old story ancient history—or at least an anomaly in the pasteurized “we don’t tolerate racism anymore” South—should check out a story that ran last week on Jezebel documenting the case of a 21-year African American who was physically removed from a North Carolina bar, presumably for drinking while black.

The “isolated incidents” keep on coming.

This week it’s some old photos of a Georgia sheriff posing in a KKK costume, presumably as part of a hilarious send-up of a famous scene from Blazing Saddles.

The shocking part of all this is that anyone remains shocked that this sort of shit remains so pervasive in Dixie.

After all, South Carolina is the state whose current lieutenant-governor, Glenn McConnell, giddily dressed up as a Confederate Army general and posed with two black “slaves.” Massively depressing photo here.

Asked by ABC’s Nightline about the Confederate flag he fought to help keep on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol (also covered in Better Off, along with a dissection of the South Carolina capitol’s bigot-celebrating grounds), McConnell replied with Colbert-esque aplomb, “I don’t see black and white. I don’t see racism.”

Neither, apparently, do plenty of his confederates.

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A Ku Klux Klan chapter in Georgia, however, has decided that part of being an upstanding civic organization is doing just that.

Thus, they’ve decided to do the only decent thing—apply to “adopt” a stretch of highway in Union County, Georgia.

In a CNN.com story written by Nick Valencia, the KKK chapter’s secretary, April Chambers, insists that the publicity stunt isn’t a publicity stunt.

“We’re not racists,” Chambers adds (of course). “We just want to be with white people. … It’s all right to be black and Latino and proud, but you can’t be white and proud. I don’t understand it.”

Yeah, sure. You’re not at all racist and you can’t understand why anyone would think otherwise.

That’s why you choose to align yourself with the group and symbolism most closely associated with lynching and the most horrific racially motivated hate crimes in American history.

That’s why you rock bed sheets and dunce caps at your meetings.

Klan no anachronistic footnote

During research for Better Off Without ’Em, I interviewed active Klan members in the South—even visited a shop in South Carolina where you can pick up your full-on Klan get-up for $125, including robe, hood, insignia and snazzy rope belt. (See picture on my homepage gallery.)

The depressing part of all this isn’t that the Klan is still around, it’s how predictable its continued existence is.

Lots of people in Dixie answer Yankee criticism of the South by falling back, intentionally or not, on historian Howard Zinn’s argument that by using the South as a whipping post to damn the most repugnant societal behavior, northerners are really just trying to shift blame for their own sins upon a group they take comfort in viewing as inferior.

By casting shame on the South, so goes the argument, the in-denial North is really just trying to absolve itself of sins that belong to the entire nation, North no less than South.

I don’t buy it.

Who is responsible?

In my two years of interviewing southerners of all stripes, I found individuals reliably quick to deny culpability and distance themselves from stereotypical southern pathologies.

The South is different now, they insisted.

We aren’t crazy religious—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who you’re thinking of.

We aren’t dedicated political obstructionists—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who you’re talking about.

We aren’t the ones who have a problem with gays—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who the media unfairly fixates on and uses to vilify the rest of us.

We aren’t racist—that’s just a small percentage of southerners who have a problem.

All of these statements may be true. The majority of southerners are not loud-mouthed, uneducated, redneck fuckwits flying Confederate flags from the backs of their KIA and Mercedes lynch wagons.

What the majority of southerners are, and have always been, however, is willing to allow the most strident, mouth-breathing “patriotic” firebrands among them to remain in control of their society’s most powerful and influential positions, be they in the realms of religion, politics, business, education, or just basic day-to-day civic operations.

Just as it was southern zealots who pushed the country into the Civil War, it was southern zealots who, while the rest of the South turned its back, were allowed to construct and maintain the legal foundations of Jim Crow; who were allowed to turn the Scopes Monkey Trial into a humiliating circus; who were allowed to subvert federal laws protecting downtrodden laborers; who were allowed to circumvent Brown vs. Board of Education and school desegregation by calling out the National Guard and building segregation “academies”; who were allowed to resist Civil Rights with dogs and water cannons; who are still allowed to sidestep equitable school funding and proclaim without ridicule that a black president’s birth certificate is fake and throw secessionist balls and insist that slavery had nothing whatsoever to do with the Civil War.

Maybe the fanatics do represent a minority. It’s still an extremely potent minority the rest of the South enables—or succumbs to—or aligns with—or votes for—year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

Theirs are the voices that perpetuate the agenda because theirs are the voices that ring with the most sincerity, that are most bereft of apology, that in their bellicosity resonate as the most authentically “southern.”

That’s why South Carolina U.S. Representative Joe Wilson can shout “You lie!” during Obama’s State of the Union address and get re-elected by a landslide. It’s why South Carolina state senator Jake Knotts can call Obama and then gubernatorial candidate and current governor Nikki Haley “ragheads” and remain in office.

That’s why that stupid fucking slave days flag is still venerated.

If there’s one thing about the South that hasn’t ever changed it’s the hypnotic influence of the crusader.

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In the face of forecasts that Atlantic Ocean levels will rise by more than three feet before the end of the century, a group of 20 legislators from coastal counties in North Carolina have introduced a bill in the State House of Representatives that would make measurements of anything more than incremental changes in sea level against the law.

“We’ve got resorts to build and we don’t care what the rest of the ocean does—our sea isn’t going to rise by more than 15.6 inches,” writes Huler. “Because otherwise it’s against the law.”

The full, contorted explanation of the bizarre law—“mental gymnastics” is the term used by a Bible scholar I quote in Better Off Without ’Em to describe the way fundamental southerners justify their medieval decrees—is outlined in the article.

Huler stretches a bit to tie the proposed legal limitation on sea levels (goddamn Atlantic Ocean!) to the state’s recent constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (Goddamn gays!) Not that I should talk—I managed to shoehorn a mini Survivor rant into a recent blog post of my own about southern schools.

Mostly, though, the article is both a typically funny and typically depressing piece about a part of the country where, when weighing the pros and cons of policy issues, the people and their elected officials often as not, as Huler notes, bury their heads in the swamp muck and allow ignorance and wishful thinking to hold sway over things like scientific evidence and basic observation of reality.

The article is linked above and also here.

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