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September’s Southern Movie of the Month

It’s college football season again.

And the only real choice for a Southern movie of the month is “The Waterboy.” Chock-full of catch phrases that have become oddball euphemisms in modern American culture, “The Waterboy” takes us to the fringes of Deep Southern culture via the football program at a tiny Louisiana college. Adam Sandler plays Bobby Boucher, a possibly-retarded man in his thirties who lives in the swamps with his mother, played by Kathy Bates. Boucher, who is obsessed with “high-quality H20,” works as the waterboy for the South Central Louisiana University Mud Dogs, coached by long-time loser “Mister Coach Klein,” played by Henry Winkler of “Happy Days” fame. Klein has fallen on hard times, brought on by the trickery of his arch-rival coach, the sinister and cruel Red Beaulieu, played by country music star Jerry Reed.

Everybody loves an underdog story, and Bobby Boucher’s ascendance (from being a no-confidence mama’s boy to a college football star who gets the girl) is egged on by the now-infamous, Cajun-drawled “You can do it!” shouted enthusiastically by Rob Snider’s unnamed character. “The Waterboy” is “Rudy” gone horribly wrong.

We learn early about Bobby Boucher’s emotional traumas, which ultimately lead to his success. He was laughed off the field of the University of Louisiana Cougars – certainly a play on LSU’s Tigers – by Red Beaulieu, and he has been told that his absent father died of dehydration, which explains his obsession with water. As a volunteer for the much-smaller SCLSU Mud Dogs, Boucher is confronted by similar contempt, but this time is told by his meek-and-mild coach to stand up for himself. When Boucher lets his anger loose in a whining, toddler-like charging fit, Coach Klein recognizes a way to end his team’s forty-game losing streak. The emotionally damaged waterboy will become his star linebacker!

And it works. Boucher is a beast! In game after game, opposing offenses are reduced to sniveling and pleading wimps, as Bobby Boucher works out the demons, picturing all of the people who have wronged him. Sometimes wandering aimlessly around the field, slapping his own helmet and talking to himself, the absurdly crazed defender changes his team’s fortunes.

And no wacky Adam Sandler film would be complete without a wacky love affair. In this one, the 1990s version of the femme fatale is chasing Bobby Boucher. Vickie Vallencourt, played by nineties bad-girl Fairuza Balk, is the sexy juvenile delinquent who – for some twisted reason – wants this slow-on-the-draw support staffer. We may not get it, but it’s still pretty funny.

Especially since Mama is having none of it. Mama may declare constantly that “Fooz-ball is the Devil!” but Vickie Vallencourt is worse. Kathy Bates unforgettable overbearing mother is always there to remind her halfwit son of what is evil in the world: education, sports, girls . . . pretty much everything except staying home with his Mama.

Complete with the old Cajun assistant coach who wears overalls and babbles in pidgin and a cross-eyed punch-drunk linebacker, the regular zaniness of Adam Sandler’s 1990s films is kind of an acquired taste: one part ’80s nostalgia, one part twisted personalities, one part silly stoner humor . . . but to this movie, we add football. Where Sandler did a terrible job of reviving Burt Reynolds’ classic role in his 2005 remake of the 1974 football movie, “The Longest Yard,” this football movie is hilarious!

I usually end these “Southern Movie of the Month” posts by discussing the movie’s representations of the Deep South. Not this time. I seriously doubt if Adam Sandler was even trying to be accurate. This madhouse movie is built on buffoonery, elevating stereotypes about Louisiana and Cajuns to absurdist comedy. Don’t bother getting haughty about “The Waterboy,” just enjoy it.

Filed under: College Football, Film/Movies, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #83

In honor of Labor Day, this week’s quote focuses on a writer’s work. For all of the advice books, how-to articles, and lesson plans out there, Zinsser says so much with this one sentence.

Good usage, to me, consists of using good words if they already exist – as they almost always do – to express myself clearly to someone else.

– from the chapter “Usage” in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, 30th anniversary edition

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

The great many Deep Souths

I’ve lived in the Deep South my entire life— in the same city as a matter of fact: Montgomery, Alabama. After years of studying and writing about this region, I’m well aware that the names of places I love have ugly meanings for many Americans. I’ve become accustomed to my daily surroundings being often-cited cases of racism, poverty and inequality . . . even though that dim view, however true, is also short-sighted.

Before I talk about this region with anyone, I always want to know: which South are you wanting to hear about? Which version are you looking for— the quirky, offbeat South that the Oxford American sells, or Garden & Gun’s South that’s all handcrafted weaponry and shabby-chic restorations, or the charmingly delicious one that Southern Living features in its colorful pages? Or maybe you’re far more serious than that, and you want to “bear witness” to the dark and shameful South that gets offered up in the interactive multimedia displays in Civil Rights interpretive centers and memorials. Are you looking for one of those?

Or possibly you’d prefer a different set of choices: pick one from among the Black Belt, the Bible Belt and the Sun Belt. They’re all here, too. Opening door number-one can show an interested on-looker all about slavery and the plantation, Reconstruction and Redeemers, lynchings and Jim Crow, marches and decay. The middle option is for you Bible-thumpers. That one has Billy Graham’s crusade and Jimmy Swaggart’s sweaty brow and Roy Moore’s big rock. Or for something lighter, that third, more modern Chamber of Commerce fabrication lets tourists and businessmen come down here and enjoy golf and hiking and beaches, in our warm weather, without thinking about all that other stuff.

Which one do you want, huh?

Or let’s say you’re a travel-foodie who wants to straddle the line between then and now, you might come down here and dine with the Southern writers du jour in town, before heading out in the country to a real live juke joint. Or maybe you’re a journalist from a liberal magazine who wants to find out how – or if – we’ve really changed since the movement years. Then you’d head for state capitols and non-profit law offices and small-town church socials, so you can paint word-pictures for people too busy to find out for themselves.

I live with all of those Deep Souths, because I’m not just passing through. I’m invested. I was raised here, my parents were raised here, I’m raising my kids here. To learn about and face the many truths, as best as I can – the good and the bad – I have been all over the Deep South for a variety of reasons, have read all four major histories of my home state, and have been studying this region for years. What can I say about the great many Deep Souths after all that? Our culture can be both endearing and discomfiting.

I’ll be honest that, for the love I have for the Deep South, I’m worn out with the historically absurd politics. With these differing evolutions of same damn arguments over and over and over, the Deep South usually comes out with the bad end of the stick. Even though pop history focuses on slavery – “moonlight and magnolias” – our complex political culture, developed in the early 1800s, has always emphasized Southern “other-ness”— we aren’t you. Looking back to the frontier days of the 1830s and 1840s, some Southern politicians didn’t want to take federal railroad money because they feared the intervention that came with it. Sound familiar? That same thinking led to secession and then war and then Reconstruction, and it dubbed the people Redeemers who reinvigorated pre-war ideals. I could keep going: patter-rollers, sharecropping, the Klan, the Great Migration, lynchings, mills and mines, convict leasing, the Depression, the movement, integration, white flight, private schools . . .

I don’t know what you’re looking for, but the Deep South is all those things that I listed before. If you do come down here, you’ll find whatever you want to find: white-sand beaches, forests full of pines and oaks, windy two-lane roads flanked by mossy trees, food cooked with butter and bacon, blues music and country music, mythic college football rivalries, hunting for animals large and small, fishing in fresh water or salt water, racism subtle and overt, long-standing injustice too deep-rooted to fathom, severe poverty as bad as parts of the Third World.

I’ve spent some real time staring at the ugly truths, as though staring them will make them better. The problems are so glaringly obvious, as are the solutions. I’m not saying that the fight isn’t worth fighting, but I will say that fighting things that are obviously wrong gets old.

In the Deep South, we have racial problems, education problems, taxation problems, jobs problems, standard-of-living problems, income-inequality problems, over-incarceration problems . . . and I’ve read about them, listened to experts describe and expound on them, read reports and studies on them, talked to other people about them, and even shared what I’ve learned about them. I’m not changing my mind about what’s right and wrong in the Deep South, I’m not shifting my values, and I’m not sinking into complacency, but I have come to one fairly simple reductive conclusion about this multifaceted region.

The endless number of consequences that we suffer down here relate directly to the way that we stolidly reject any suggestions that we do better. As for me, riffing off of Albert Murray’s words, I’m getting less and less interested in the sociological and the political, and more and more interested in the human beings who are living our lives down here. I set out at the beginning of the 21st century to educate myself on our past, and I did that— the region’s history and my family history . . . But as much as I might like to turn my attention elsewhere, in the Deep South we can’t let bygones be bygones. The dead won’t let us. They hover and swoop, surveying progress with snarled upper lips, relentlessly urging a turgid way of life.

Me, I am on the side of the living. I can’t leave the Deep South, literally or intellectually, because this is my home. Our history might be reinterpreted, but it can’t be changed. As we inch toward our future, I’m sorry to say that more-of-the-same seems inevitable. The present is where possibility resides.

All I know at this point in a long period of study and thought is: what the Deep South needs is a massive progressive shift driven by an honest acknowledgment of real problems. That’s it, I have nothing else to declare beyond that. For positive change to happen, the majority of people in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana (and also in northern Florida, Tennessee, and Arkansas) must recognize the need for educating all people, must agree that taxes are necessary to fund improvements, must stop accepting low-wage jobs lured with corporate tax breaks, and must understand that the same-old leaders will never achieve results. Until those things happen, the same problems, like under-performing schools and over-capacity prisons, will persist. There may be a great many Deep Souths, but that is common to all of them.

Filed under: Social Justice, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #82

In honor of back-to-school, this quote is for all of the teachers who give writing assignments and who will spend the next nine to ten months begging their students in one way or the other to understand this very basic idea:

In some cases, the best design is no design, as with a love letter, which is simply an outpouring, or with a casual essay, which is a ramble. But in most cases, planning must be a deliberate prelude to writing. The first principle of composition, therefore, is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.

– from Section II, “Elementary Principles of Composition,” in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition

Filed under: Education, Teaching, Writing and Editing

from the “Lost in Montgomery” blog

This blog post on Montgomery’s recycling program, written by another local writer on her blog, published this week, too. Both her tone and her take on the program are very different from mine. Take a look-see by clicking on the red link.

Filed under: Alabama, Local Issues, The Deep South, The Environment

Montgomery’s award-winning recycling program!

This local story is one I’ve been following for about two years. Back in July 2013, Montgomery began efforts at having a “green” recycling facility that would improve the ease of recycling and turn our city’s trash into renewable energy. The process of contracting with an independent company and building the facility took a while. I was writing about it in May 2014 when the city was still working on this goal and seemed to have realized it. Then in November of last year, the IREP Montgomery facility was up and running.

Now, on August 13, Montgomery’s local NBC affiliate WSFA reported that our state of the art recycling facility has won an award! Their online article explains that the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama has awarded IREP its Innovation Award for Outstanding Public Private Partnership. About the facility, we learn:

Right now, Infinitus Renewable Energy Park, or IREP, diverts nearly 60 percent of Montgomery residents’ waste from the city landfill, and all residents have to do is throw their garbage in the green can.

Moreover,

This is just the first phase in the recycling process. The company is looking to take more steps like converting the trash into a type of fuel, which would result in recycling 75 percent of waste. 

Last month, in my post “Bad News Times Three, Alabama,” I shared some of the downsides of life here. But stories like this one can’t be ignored either. The City of Montgomery’s handling of this very real public-administration issue is forward-looking and responsible, and I’m proud of our city’s leaders for seeing it through to fruition.

To learn more about Montgomery’s award-winning waste management/recycling program, click here.

Filed under: Alabama, Local Issues, The Deep South, The Environment

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #81

– taken from The New York Times, May 8, 2015

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

Poll: Is grape soda the best thing ever?

Take Our Poll
Filed under: Food, The Deep South

A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week #80

The goal of the ESY curriculum is to empower students with the knowledge and values to make food choices that are healthy for them, their communities, and the environment.

The curriculum becomes more relevant, engaging, and further supports their classroom achievement by bringing academic subjects to life. In addition to intentional academic connections, the curriculum also develops in students: a sense of curiosity and dignity; the ability to work as a team to complete a job well; respect for oneself and others; an appreciation for diversity; and an understanding of how the ritual of eating together at the table connects families and communities.

– from the About page for The Edible Schoolyard Berkeley

Filed under: Teaching, Writing and Editing

The Green Pope— Francis, that is.

Earlier this year, my post “Shut Up, Doomsayers!” focused on my desire to hear a solution-oriented discussion of our global environmental problems. I’m tired of hearing how the planet is falling apart, largely due to human behavior, without hearing much about how to change it.  That post was published back in February.

All I really needed was to wait until May, when Pope Francis published his encyclical, Laudato Si. This 245-point treatise, separated into six chapters, may focus on ecological concerns, but it also weaves these issues into greater matters of faith, values, materialism, greed, and social justice. Early on, Pope Francis had me hooked; in point 14, under the heading “My Appeal,” he writes,

I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all. The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity. As the bishops of Southern Africa have stated: “Everyone’s talents and involvement are needed to redress the damage caused by human abuse of God’s creation”. All of us can cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents.

Everyone may not own property on this planet, but everyone does live on it and rely on it. We all need the air, water and food that the Earth provides. That “universal solidarity” makes us all stakeholders in finding solutions to environmental problems.

After his introduction, the pope’s six chapters interweave social concerns, scientific findings and Catholic teachings, and we end with a closing prayer. The first three chapters identify the problem and the role of faith in solving it. This crisis isn’t only a matter of public policy or geopolitics. The head of the world’s largest religious denomination is weighing in, and he has his say in Laudato Si.

Moving along, in chapter Four, “Integral Ecology,” Pope Francis insists that, as a part of the system, we have all to participate responsibly in this discourse. He writes, in point 161:

Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world. The effects of the present imbalance can only be reduced by our decisive action, here and now.

I have children, who were born in the first decade of the millenium, and I’d like to think that their lifespan will run into the 2070s and 2080s. And, if they have children of their own, my grandchildren’s lives could extend into the twenty-second century. This downward environmental destruction may be slow, but I want to know that we did all we could, for everyone we could help, in the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. Catholics love to talk about the respect for the unborn— well, this looming environmental is all about the unborn.

Chapter five, “Lines of Approach and Action,” focuses on what we need to be doing now. Here Pope Francis gets down on ground level, offering a series of point-by-point discussions of individuals efforts, how they succeeded or failed, and also reminding us in point 180:

There are no uniform recipes, because each country or region has its own problems and limitations. It is also true that political realism may call for transitional measures and technologies, so long as these are accompanied by the gradual framing and acceptance of binding commitments. At the same time, on the national and local levels, much still needs to be done, such as promoting ways of conserving energy.

Pope Francis is right. We can’t just wake up one morning and decide to be “green.” If we’re going to phase out fossil fuels, we can’t just outlaw gasoline and oil one day! Public policy has to be shaped, which will lead us through changing over our cars, allowing time to comply with new standards. Oil and gas workers need to be re-trained for new jobs, and refineries need to be shut down responsibly. The switch-over would take years.

Laudato Si takes time to read and to absorb, and the pope’s immense understanding of our faith connects so many features of our lives to this issue. For example, he writes at one point that we should not respect the irresponsible “trafficking” of goods . . . nor of human beings. One running theme of this encyclical is interconnectedness: we are all children of God, taking our sustenance from God’s creation, and as such we should be respectful of God and each other.

So where do we go from here? In point 194, he writes:

For new models of progress to arise, there is a need to change “models of global development” this will entail a responsible reflection on “the meaning of the economy and its goals with an eye to correcting its malfunctions and misapplications.” It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with progress. Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.

In the final chapter, Pope Francis offers an alternative, because “we human beings above all who need to change.” This better way is a life that ties in ecological awareness as an essential component of one’s faith. Our Catholic faith reminds us that all people are sinners, that all people can do better.

NOTE: For further reading, The Atlantic published a short piece titled “The Father, The Sun, and the Holy Spirit,” in its April 2011 issue, about then-Pope Benedict’s efforts to green up the Vatican.

Filed under: Catholicism, Civil Rights, Social Justice, The Environment