Oh ye of little faith.
On at least a couple of occasions I have used this blog to rail, rant, rave and recriminate against the local yokel actions of the Fannin County Board of Commissioners. Some of you have suggested to me that a newcomer in a rural county like Fannin has little chance of influencing the way the entrenched good ol’ boys do their business. Well, read on.
About a year ago I discovered that Fannin County does not post its code of ordinances online for people to review at their convenience. That bugged me. Most local governments began making their codes of ordinances available online shortly after the worldwide web become established. What was that—thirty years ago? I figured it was about time that Fannin County got with the times. So about seven months ago I wrote an open letter to the Fannin County commissioners urging them to place their code online. I also met with the Bill Simonds, the chairmen of the county commission, to urge my point.
A couple of weeks later I discovered that the last time Fannin County codified its ordinances was in 2007. That really bugged me. How the hell can you know what the law is if you don’t codify it? Hammurabi figured that out 4,000 years ago. I understand that it takes longer for new innovations to spread into the sticks, but four millennia is a bit much don’t you think?
At the same time that I found a Georgia statute, enacted in 2001, which requires Georgia counties to codify and publish their ordinances annually. Fannin County has complied with the statute only once in 14 years. So I wrote a letter to Simonds and the county attorney (who I have little regard for) accompanied by a detailed analysis of the statute.
For months after that I heard nothing from Simonds. My frustration reached a peak about five weeks ago, and I tried to contact him to find out what the county was doing to comply with the statute. All four of the emails I sent to his official email address (which is on his business card but not on the county website) returned an error message. Now I was really getting pissed off.
A couple of weeks ago something else happened that pissed me off and that is Simonds’ most recent attempt to limit what citizens can talk about during the open public comments portion of the commission meetings. Last year he enacted a rule that prohibited political comments. At the last commission meeting he announced a list of five topics that he did not want citizens to discuss during public comment—things like government spending and efforts to improve county government. Such rules are, of course, gross violations of the First Amendment.
His recent attempt to stifle free speech pissed me off so much that I wrote letters to the editors of all three local newspapers accusing him of acting like a petty two-bit banana republic dictator. Perhaps it is not the most calm and dispassionate letter I have ever written.
The day after I emailed the letter to the newspapers I stopped in to see Simonds to see if the county had made any progress in codifying and publishing its ordinances. To my utter delight he told me that he and the county attorney had met with Municipal Code Corporation, a company that codifies ordinances and publishes them online, and that the county was in the process of complying with the statute.
He thanked me for bringing the statute to his attention and said that he had not known that the statute existed until I called his attention to it. Never one to miss an opportunity to get in a dig, I observed that it is the county attorney’s job to keep him informed of such matters. (He is aware of my feelings for the county attorney. In the previous meeting with him seven months ago I told him that she was not very good. I believe I may have used the word “horrible.”)
Then, to my surprise, he asked me what I thought about his rules for public comment at county commission meetings. I gave him an earful about how they were unconstitutional and exposed the county to an indefensible lawsuit for damages and attorney’s fees under the federal civil rights act. Even though a number of people have told me that he is an unprincipled weasel, it seemed to me that he was receptive to what I had to say.
He asked me to submit something in writing about the law in this area. Fortunately, I wrote an article for the Florida Bar Journal on this subject several years ago. It is stock full of complicated and lengthy legal citations. It was not accepted for publication, and I understand the reason why. I honed and distilled the article until it is so dense and obtuse that it reads like something out of the New England Journal of Medicine. Frankly, it is almost unintelligible to most lawyers, much less layman.
So my plan is to submit an easy-to-read summary of the law to Simonds and attach the article to show my bona fides. I’m almost certain that no one in county government, not even the county attorney, will be able to wade through the article, but that’s not the point. With all that dense legal prose and pages and pages of citations using all those impressive citation forms like see, e.g, rev’d on other grounds, and contra, the article is bound to impress the shit of them and make them think I’m as smart as Judge Judy.
It may occur to you at this point that Simonds’ apparent willingness to listen to me about his unconstitutional restrictions on free speech has created a real problem for me. Remember that I just sent letters to the editors of every newspaper in town accusing him of being a two-bit banana republic dictator who tramples the First Amendment rights of the good citizens of Fannin County. Oops.
I’ve never read “How to Make Friends and Influence People,” but I’m pretty sure there’s a chapter in there that says it’s not the best idea to insult someone you are trying to influence. So now I have frantic emails out to the newspapers begging them not to publish my letter. Because the newspapers are weekly I won’t know how successful I have been until the middle of next week.
So I guess the primary point of this post is that it is possible for an outsider to have an impact on the way the good ol’ boys do things. All it takes is doing your research, knowing what you’re talking about, making good suggestions and not insulting them. It seems I have to work on the last point.
When you’re a new person in a new place you have to accept that some things will be different. If you have moved to a rural area you need to be prepared for a certain lack of sophistication at times. In such circumstances it’s a good idea to keep your comments muted and avoid being too critical. No one wants to hear a recent transplant spouting off how things were so much better in the place where he or she came from. In Florida that sort of attitude on the part of newcomers from the north gave rise to bumper stickers suggesting that if they thought things were so much better up north they should go back there.
So I will begin this post by diplomatically saying that there are many things about the Fannin County government that are good. It’s very efficient at things like maintaining roads, cutting roadside grass beside the roads, and clearing fallen trees from roads. In fact, you have to say that it’s got this road thing down. Furthermore, based on the fact that I have no complaints, it’s obviously good at many other things that local governments do. To its great credit, it has a very low tax rate, particularly by Florida standards, and it has not raised taxes in many years. (Of course, another way to look at that is maybe the taxes were too high to begin with.)
But in other respects, the Fannin County government is amateur hour or, as the title of this post suggests, local yokel politics. There is, unfortunately, much that is hidebound, backward, insular and unsophisticated about the government of this county.
For instance, the county has a website but, unlike virtually every other website in the world, it does not have a “contact us” button to enable you to send emails to county officials. Nowhere on the website are there any email addresses for county officials. I didn’t even know the county commissioners and county clerk had email addresses until I picked up their cards at the county government center.
The website does have a phone directory page so at least the county has embraced some communication technology above the level of smoke signals, semaphore and the telegraph. Let’s see, the telephone was invented in the 1870s so that only puts the county 140 years behind the times.
What is amazing to me about the lack of an email contact feature on the county’s website is that every book I ever read on creating a website emphasizes the importance of having a “contact us” feature as part of the website. It’s generally covered no later than Chapter 2. Why be on the internet unless you intend to use the internet to facilitate communication? It’s kind of like having a business brochure that doesn’t list your phone number.
Not that listing the commissioners’ email addresses would be much help. I tried to email the commission chairman four times over the last four weeks and each time my email has returned with the following error message: "Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable." Now you would think that after four weeks the chairman would realize that he was not getting any emails and get the problem addressed. You might say, “Well, maybe he doesn’t use email.” However, if that’s the case, why does his card list an email address at fannincountyga.org?
While this example may seem petty to you, I think it is emblematic of the fact that Fannin County has one foot on the 21st Century and the other foot somewhere in the 1950s.
The latest head turner from the county commission has to do with the public comment portion of county meetings. This is the portion of the meeting where citizens can make comments to the commission. I told you last year that the commission chairman had promulgated a rule that forbids “political comments” by citizens. I can’t begin to describe to you what a blatantly unconstitutional restriction of free speech that is. Numerous U.S. Supreme Court cases have emphatically held that government may regulate the time, place and manner of speech, but not the content of that speech. Hell, even a fifth grade civics student should know that. But not, apparently, our commission chairman or the county attorney because the rule still exists.
It gets worse. At the last meeting the chairman prohibited public comment on a range of topics including any comments critical of the local newspapers. Unbelievable.
Look, I love living here, and I recognize that I need to adjust to the fact that they do some things differently here. But this latest demonstration of local yokel politics makes me think that I’m living in some two-bit banana republic.
Is it enough to stir me to take some action? I haven’t decided yet. On the one hand I thought my battles were behind me. The great flywheel of righteous indignation that drove me once has slowed. On the other hand, I don’t know if I can just sit around without at the very least throwing in a snide comment or two.
You know what’s really ironic? Just last week the commission chairman’s picture was in the papers showing him signing a proclamation declaring it to be Constitution Week. It’s too bad he never took the time to read the damn thing.
I am in the habit of watching the national news in the evening. It’s one of the things you have the leisure to do when you’re retired. It’s probably a mistake because all it does is make me angry and increasingly pessimistic about the future of our country, our world and mankind in general. I’m cantankerous enough as it is; I certainly don’t need the national news poking me in the ass on a daily basis.
When I watch the news I often feel like I’m one of those underwater explorers looking out the small window of a bathyscaphe at alien undersea life. The United States that is revealed on the nightly news seems so different from the world that I live in here in rural Southern Appalachia. This may be naïve, but I feel like I live in an island of sanity in a world that has gone crazy.
Let’s take one example. The news is filled with accounts of young men and women in this country being radicalized by Islamic extremism to the point of going to join ISIS or commit homegrown acts of terror in the name of Allah and his Prophet. It is inconceivable to me that a young person’s lot in life could be so bad he or she would believe that joining ISIS represents a better future. I cannot fathom why anyone born in the United States would want to live under an ideology that condones and encourages the barbaric acts that the Islamic State commits: forcing women into sexual slavery, killing children, destroying priceless historic sites and burning, drowning and beheading fellow humans.
I don’t care how grim your situation is in our country, there is no way that any sane person can possibly believe that life in an ISIS-controlled state would be better on any level. I guess the key word in that statement is “sane,” and I’m compelled to conclude that radicalized homegrown terrorists are not rational human beings.
That’s just one example of why I get the feeling that the country that I see every night on the news has gone crazy. There are others:
- A system that tolerates a Congress that exempts itself from the laws and regulations it imposes on the citizenry while voting themselves excessive benefits and privileges;
- Politicians apologizing for saying that all lives matter;
- Men and women in the military having to resort to food stamps and other public welfare to support themselves and their families because their pay is so low;
- A VA system that treats veterans like second class citizens;
- A Federal bureaucracy that has lost the ability to discipline its employees for gross misconduct and misfeasance.
Here’s another, smaller example. I read the other day that the United States Department of Agriculture has mounted a campaign to get producers to stop referring to small raisins as midget raisins because the word “midget” is offensive. If you don’t believe me, check out this website.
My first reaction was: Are you shitting me!? First of all, I didn’t know there were such things as midget raisins, and I’m willing to bet that nine-tenths of the American public didn’t either. So if the term is offensive it’s certainly not being bandied about. Second, I question whether most people hearing the term would be truly offended. I certainly didn’t think of small people when I read the term. It’s not like they are called dago raisins or kike raisins or short bus raisins. Regardless of whether a few people subjectively feel that the term “midget raisins” is in some way a slight on their stature, it strikes me as being utterly crazy that taxpayer dollars are being used for such foolishness. Maybe it’s time to bring back Randy Newman’s song about short people.
I could go on and on. (There are a lot of things that piss me off. I might be one of the most pissed off people in the world. It's one of my endearing personality traits.) Note that I have intentionally avoided any examples that smack of politics or political ideology because your yin could be my yang, but I think you get my point. There is so much happening in this country that defies common sense, logic, or explanation.
As I said above, I have this strong sense that I live in an island of sanity in a world that has gone crazy, and it is a great comfort to me to feel like that. I know that many of you will conclude that I’m crazy in believing that. And I freely acknowledge that my feelings in this regard are not very rational and are based in large part on my overly emotional and romantic view of rural small town life.
But that doesn’t matter. In this case perception is more important than reality, at least when it comes to my state of mind. There is such a state of grace as being fat, dumb and happy. What’s important in that phrase is being dumb enough to fail to realize that you shouldn’t be fat or happy.
So I guess the point of this post is that I’m okay with being fat, dumb and happy about living in a rural county near a small town in Southern Appalachia regardless of whether my perceptions are irrational or not.
Maybe the solution to my problem is to stop watching the nightly news. But that would require me to do an “ostrich with its head in the sand” analysis, and that sounds like a lot of mental effort. Screw it—I’m going out to play in the garden.
Believe it or not, the first signs of fall have come to Fannin County. The leaves on the Sassafras and Sourwood trees have started to turn. Acorns are falling in droves out of the oak trees. Already there are a few scattered fallen leaves cluttering our yard. I even saw a wooly caterpillar the other day. Sure signs that the seasons are changing, and summer is waning.
The wooly caterpillar was all reddish-brown with no black line in the middle. I don’t remember whether that’s a sign it will be a cold winter or a mild winter. I do know that the telltale signs of summer’s passing are early this year. The Old Farmer’s Almanac says it will be a cold and wet winter. More significantly, perhaps, weather scientists are predicting that winter in the American southeast could be unusually cold and wet based on an exceptionally large El Nino in the Pacific. A cold and wet winter in these parts likely means more snow than usual.
I feel ambivalent about the prospect of winter, particularly a cold and wet one. On the one hand, winter means I get a break from tending to the garden and mowing the yard and the fields. On the other hand, it means many days of being forced to stay indoors because of the cold and the lack of things to do outside. I hate being forced indoors and being bored. I need to make sure I have plenty of indoor activities to keep me busy. Maybe this will be the winter that I start the novel that I’ve been wanting to write for the last 40 years.
One of the things I intend to do this winter is to learn how to play the dulcimer, and to that end I am taking a beginning dulcimer class. I know what you are thinking. The dulcimer for God’s sake! Real men don’t play the dulcimer! Have I become a sensitive, namby-pamby, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, tie dye shirt-wearing, folksong-singing wimp?
I acknowledge that the dulcimer is not exactly a hard-rocking, balls-to-the-wall instrument. You’re not going to be playing ZZ Top, AC/DC or Jason Aldean music on it. The first thing I think of when I hear the word “dulcimer” is some frail, long-haired, trembly-voiced, sandal-wearing, pale-skinned young woman plaintively singing 17th century folksongs with phrases like “fare thee well” and “hither and yon.”
All that may be true, but the dulcimer has a few things to commend itself to my attention. First of all, it is one of the few musical instruments that originated in the United States. Moreover, it originated in the Appalachian Mountains which means that it lends itself to playing bluegrass and other types of music that are popular in these parts.
Second, it is a chording instrument, meaning you can play chords on it. A chord is composed of two or more notes played simultaneously. I’ve played the bass guitar for 30 years. You play the bass guitar one string at a time. It is not, therefore, a chording instrument. That’s the main reason you don’t find people sitting around the campfire singing along to someone playing the bass guitar. (Not that I particularly want to sit around the campfire playing my dulcimer and singing Kumbaya with a group of people.)
Finally, it is a simple instrument. The classic mountain dulcimer has four strings. The top two strings are the same gauge and tuned the same. Around here most folks eliminate one of the top two strings which means you only have three strings to fool around with. Three strings. That’s one step up in complexity from rhythm sticks, a tub bass or the tambourine. The strings are far apart (that’s important when you’re used to playing the bass guitar). The chords do not require you to wrap your fingers around each other like on a guitar. In other words, the dulcimer is made for musical idiots which is why it’s so good for me.
So I attended my first class last week. I walked in the room and discovered the woman who teaches the class and six older women all of whom looked like they could have played Mrs. Doubtfire. When I stepped into the room all six of them looked up at me with pleasant little smiles on their faces. I could hear their thoughts. "Oh look. There's a man in the class. How nice." I half expected one of them to offer me a crumpet.
I’m not a particularly big man, but I am 6’ 1” and 240 pounds so I occupy some space. My size 13 cowboy boots should have warning flags on the ends so people do not trip over them. My usual public face has been described as a cross between a glare and a scowl. It’s fair to say that I was the odd monkey in the room. If the scenario was used as a simple I.Q. test to see if kindergarten kids could pick out what was wrong with this picture, I was the correct answer.
After introductions, the class started. It seems to be my lot in life that every time I take a class like this it is taught by a former grade school teacher. This class was no exception. Maybe I’m just a cantankerous old fart, but I hate being told the obvious. I like to cut ahead to the meat of the issue or presentation. But I guess old habits die hard, and when you’ve been teaching second graders for 40 years, you just can’t help yourself. So I had to sit through a lot of verbiage telling me the obvious before we got down to brass tacks. Of course, all these snide comments kept floating through my mind while she was speaking. It went a little like this:
Hello, I’m your teacher. (No shit! That’s probably why you’re sitting at the front of the class facing us.)
This is a dulcimer. (Thank God. I was afraid this thing I brought to the class may have been a bowling ball.)
These are the strings. (What an idiot. I thought they were shish kebob skewers.)
There are four of them. (Whew! At least I passed the math test.)
These holes on the top are where the sound comes out. (What a relief. I was afraid it would be emailed to me.)
Here’s how you strum the dulcimer. You strum this way, and then you strum back. (Ah. I was worried that there might be multidimensional strumming.)
And so it went. The first class is in the bag. I know how to place the dulcimer on my lap (on both thighs obviously), tune and strum the instrument. I’m ready to move on to bigger and better things. Maybe next week we’ll actually learn some notes. It won’t be long before we’re ready to hit the road to entertain people with popular dulcimer favorites like…err…whatever. I think we’ll bill ourselves as Grumpy and the Doubtfire Sextet.
I apologize for the delay in posting this new post but I have a good excuse. Meredith and I were in Camp Lejeune, N.C., over the weekend visiting our youngest son, Mike. He is in the Marines, and he graduated from the School of Infantry (SOI) last week. We went for the graduation and ended up helping him transfer to his first assignment “in the fleet.” That’s Marine jargon for doing actual duties as a full-fledged Marine as opposed to training to become a Marine. He has been assigned to the 2d Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) Battalion.
The Marines made him an 81 mm mortarman which means, obviously, that his job is to fire the 81 mm mortar. In the 2d LAR the mortar is carried around in an eight-wheeled light armored vehicle called (as you can probably guess by now) an LAV.
Mike is happy with his assignment for several reasons. First, he does not have to carry the 81 mm mortar which is a one heavy son of a bitch. Second, he gets to ride rather than walk. Third, even though he has an infantry MOS (military occupational specialty), his job does not, in his words, involve breaking down doors to enter buildings which may be filled with bad guys. Instead, his job is to blow up the buildings containing the bad guys and thereby save everyone time, effort and danger. His mother and I like that, and I agree totally with the concept. Why use rifles when heavy artillery or a B52 carpet bombing will do the job? My philosophy is that in war and litigation, there is no such thing as overkill.
Our chance to spend a few days with Mike fits in nicely with the theme of this post—family. It should be obvious to anyone reading this blog that I love living in a rural area and believe that the world would be a better place if everyone lived in a small town. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what makes rural, small town life so different from life in the city or crowded suburbia, and I’ve concluded that it’s due to many factors.
I’m aware that I’m basing my conclusions on limited data. I grew up as an Army brat moving from one Army base to another. I attended college at a small liberal arts school in Pennsylvania and graduate school and law school at the University of Florida. Clearly, none of that exposed me in any meaningful way to life in the country or in the city or suburbia. Thus, all I have to go on in comparing urban/suburban life with country/small town life is 37 years living in crowded Pinellas County, Florida, and the last two years living in Fannin County in rural southern Appalachia. Even so, my gut tells me that that my experiences and observations here probably hold true for most rural areas and small towns.
One thing I’ve noticed is that family is very important to people around here. I’m not talking simply about parents and children; I’m talking about extended family—grandparents, cousins, second cousins, nephews and nieces. Sometimes I get the impression that everyone around here is related to everyone else either by blood or marriage. It also seems like all or most of this extended family has not strayed too far from the roost; they all seem to live in or near Fannin County.
The other thing I’ve noticed is that people around here tend to have deep family roots in the sense that they know their genealogy, who their grandparents and great grandparents were, and who their extend kin and distant relations are. One gets the impression that their family roots are important to them. It is not uncommon to see a notice in the local paper that a family is having a “homecoming.” This is where extended family members—old and young alike—gather for the weekend. In many cases this involves a visit to spruce up the old family cemetery. When I first read about homecomings I was reminded of the practice of ancestor worship which prevails in some Asian cultures.
By contrast, my sense is that extended family ties and family roots are less important to folks in urban areas. For one thing, I suspect that urban families are more likely to be dispersed with family members living in different cities and states.
I believe that the strong stress on family is one of the reasons that living in a rural area with a small town feels different than living in a highly populated place. There is a greater sense of connectedness, community and shared values. The people seem more grounded and rooted. There is less division and more consensus. Because they are comfortable with who and where they are they have less compulsion to separate themselves from the maddening masses through bizarre dress, different lifestyles and aberrant behavior. We all have seen the email pictures of weirdly stressed wackos in Walmart. I guarantee you will not see anything like that in a rural Walmart.
I know I sound like a limp-wristed, corduroy jacket-wearing, liberal sociology professor, but I really would like to figure out what it is that makes me perceive that there is a difference between country folk and city folk. For one thing, I’d like to know whether there is any objective basis for feeling the way I do or whether I’m full of beans and engaging in a giant romantic fantasy.
But do not fear. I promise that I will not go soft and academic on you. As tangible proof of that, I am trying to find out whether it is possible to buy a working 81 mm mortar on the black market. You see, I have this deer and mole problem in my garden that I would like to take care of…
