How PDO Correlates to RM-DUI

I note this week a drawing in the local rag portraying the future development of 3.5 million square feet of military-industrial office, residential and commercial space. The problem from my perspective is it appears the 3 acres constituting the boundaries of my living space are subsumed underneath the eastern edge.

It's a tradition within our household, the morning my blood is drawn at the lab, to take breakfast at a cafe across the street from a Confederate cemetery. It's a smoke-ful establishment frequented mostly by good-ole-boys and a few bewildered tourists. As the wife and I searched for markers of our home on the sketch, the fella at the next table allowed he owned 12 acres in the path of the proposed progress. After pontificating upon the potential for millions to be made, he said, "I've lived here all my life, but I'm not wedded to it."

I've been here before. I'm of PDO (Pre-Disney Orlando) lineage. As David Brooks writes in On Paradise Drive - How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, "what happens when people accumulated in these sprawling suburban zones are given the power through the firms they are now starting admist the Fudruckers to re-make human nature? What values will guide them?"

A mid-1960's PDO could still glimpse, here and there, faded painted letters of 'White and Colored,' on exterior walls of recreational lakeside restrooms. My dad, a classic Hubert Humphrey liberal by nature, yet ever on the hunt for a $7 haircut, patronized a barber shop that transformed itself into greater Orlando George Wallace for President headquarters during the 1972 primary. Even as post-P.O.D. loomed large on the horizon, George won the precinct and state handily.

In a recent editorial entitled, If there's really a 'South,' Lee is the Key to It, Paul Greenberg wrote "It's not clear just when the general left history and entered myth, but it is clear that he represents something more than the sum total of his battles or even his life - it is what he was, and still is - at least to some of us, the few of us left. You know who you are."

Let's take that a step further. Over the land on which I'm writing now, another Southern general mightily strode the earth, upon Sorrel, his gallant steed. His headquarters for the battle of Fredericksburg was 5 miles to the southeast, the battle, 10 miles to the northwest. He died eight miles south at a place called the Stonewall Jackson Shrine minus the arm that's buried 20 miles to the west at a smaller shrine of its own.

In a January 5th book review of Still Standing: The Stonewall Jackson Story, also published in the local rag, Michael Aubrecht writes, "Most often neglected are his charitable efforts on behalf of local blacks, including the rarely discussed establishment of the first black Sunday school in Lexington. Truly Jackson was more than just a military commander. He was a paternal deliverer of black literacy and was instrumental in aiding those seeking the teachings of the Christian doctrine."

The word 'paternal,' is rather pregnant, don't you think? How is it that a man could lend his brilliant tactical leadership to a cause devoted to enslaving a people to whom he was simultaneously delivering the precious gift of literacy?

That very point was discussed last month at the annual Council of the Episcopal Church of Mississippi. According to Charles Reagan Wilson, Professor of History at the Univesity of Mississippi, while the Bishop of the day, William Mercer Green, "was glad to educate slaves and bring them into the church believing that faith in Christ would ultimately save them from their savage ways - his work blurs the line between hero and villian," since, "it was not (the slaves) choice what religion they were converted to," and the "work lent an air of legitmacy to slavery."

The NY Times reported an incident in January where vandals broke in and trashed Robert Frost's farmhouse in Vermont. A few days ago, it was reported in Massachusetts that two men are accused of burining down the birthplace of 'Mary had a Little Lamb' nursery rhyme author, Mary Elizabeth Sawyer. While no one in Virginia is about to dig up Stonewall's arm, we might find in another five years, it's buried under a 7-11. The South where I live blurs lines between a dedication to the preservation of a mythic symbolism and a willingness to be swamped by riches generated from the relentless march of development.

Spurred on by this paradox, I've researched other enduring symbols of Southern culture. One such is the frequency of Riding Lawnmower DUI (RL-DUI), a sub-culture where country singer George Jones is both pioneer and gold standard, and against whom all subsequent contenders must be measured. Recent RL-DUI stat's, I've exhaustively unearthed, and verified, utilizing a painstakingly scholarly methodology, reveal, of 38 incidents, reported over the past year, 34.21%, or fully one third of all RL-DUI, still occur in the South. The two highest competitors, the Midwest, and multiple countries overseas (mostly European), tie at precisely 21.05%; the North comes in at 13.16%; the West trailing, at 10.53%.

The only two Horse-borne RL-DUI, reminiscent of glory days past, are exclusive to the South, as well as being the home of more Golf Cart DUI's then anywhere else. (Surpisingly, none of the three slower-paced electric scooter RL-DUI were Southern, where as you might have expected post-PDO Floridians to contribute at least one case.)

Thus, the South lives on, in our hearts and minds, as exemplified by the gentleman I spotted the other day wearing post-operative hospital booties as sandals. There's a spirit here which can never be extinguished even while our landscape undergoes massive upheaveal.

When I drive the beloved backroads of the Virginia countryside, I often wonder if I could have fought compartmentally, in terms of naming it a 'home-state invasion, to preserve this beautiful landscape which enriches my soul, knowing I was also contributing to the preservation of that Southern 'peculiar' institution. Looking back, upon the past few weeks, when we discussed Vichy; examining the photographs of the leading French generals, even in their grandest uniformed finery; they look sheepish, as if they knew all along what they were doing was wrong even as they justified doing it in the name of national post-country preservation. They couldn't evade the rotten smell as much as they endeavored to disguise it.

If we skate on the surface, without noticing what lies under the ice, try as we might, the smell of fish will always rise.