SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins A Crackerjack Election Fabulous! Experts confounded! Pollsters astounded! Upsets, surprises! A crackerjack election! Is there anything more satisfying than having all the...
...only Southern women wear high heels on hikes...
...Right away you know that the man who said that is from the Middle West and the woman he said it to is from the South...
...It was bliss to watch George Bush in New Hampshire, swearing up and down the Granite State that he is one of the truest, bluest Yankees who ever lived...
...Magnolias, moonshine, and mint juleps may still be the way the South is identified, but there's something happening in working-class bowling alleys that's worth looking at, too...
...Or brags about what an aristocrat he is and then votes for George Wallace...
...Still, we hear grumbling from the dyspeptics...
...Albans prep school up East and Harvard College, came South and claimed his daddy made him shovel pig manure...
...Or brags about what a populist he is and then votes for Barry Goldwater...
...In the first place, the South is two regions—Broke and Not Broke...
...None of them "Presidential," you say...
...Albert Gore, who went to St...
...As for the South's old curse, racism, I've never thought it was either relevant or useful to point out that the North, too, is riddled with racism...
...Both states have large Hispanic populations, but Tejanos are nothing like Cu-banos...
...The exciting thing about the South is that the changes are so dramatic: You can see them everywhere, not just the end of segregation but the beginning of integration...
...Their governors, Los Dos Bobos, are both embarrassing pinheaded Republicans, but otherwise Bill Clements and Bob Martinez are nothing alike...
...Watching the Presidential candidates metamorphose into Southerners was sort of like watching The Fly...
...Poor Bruce Babbitt has dropped out, a victim, everyone says, of honesty...
...This makes us a lot less dull than, say, Michael Dukakis, but there's no point in pretending we're not nuts...
...Ihave been trying to help visiting Yankee journalists who were assigned to explain Southern politics...
...Southerners are not only capable of holding many contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time, but also of believing six impossible things before breakfast...
...Midwestern women are too sensible to wear high heels on hikes...
...Is there anything more satisfying than having all the They-Sayers turn out to be wrong...
...One hears them saying terminally sensible things like, "Ethel, I told you if you wore high heels on the hike, you'd get sore feet...
...Also, there are two jokers in the crowd, the bookends, Texas and Florida, which are different from the rest of the South but also from each other...
...Even what's alike about them is different...
...Under the Texas nepotism law, a public official may not hire "any person related within the second degree of affinity or within the third degree of consanguinity...
...Paul Simon kept pointing out he was from southern Illinois, which wasn't much but all he had...
...Almost all the teams are integrated...
...This is dreamy...
...What more could anyone want from these candidates in the way of public entertainment...
...Bob Dole is clearly up for first-degree affinity, having married a Carolina girl, which made him a South-erner-in-law...
...Hell, put a surtax on bullshit, make it retroactive to the day this campaign started, and it'll pay off the national debt...
...Surely you jest...
...There were a couple of regional problems with the First Great Southern Regional Primary...
...Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...And is able to say with a straight face he sees nothing peculiar about any of this...
...But it was very heaven to watch him less than a week later wearing a cowboy hat and neckerchief, riding in the Houston Fat Stock Show parade...
...Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma are broke...
...Or brags about what an isolationist he is and then votes for Richard M. Nixon...
...Ah am one of y'all...
...Pat Robertson, an actual grit-eating Southerner, claimed the Soviets have put missiles into Cuba, but wouldn't tell how he knew...
...To Southerners, appearances are more important than pain...
...One tries to be delicate, pointing out that Southerners are more interesting, more friendly, and more animated than other Americans (all of which I devoutly believe), but let's face it, what it comes down to is we're crazy...
...As a rule, I try to avoid conspiracy theories, but do you suppose it's possible that all the Presidential candidates have entered into a secret pact to conduct this whole race for the maximum ecstasy of political cartoonists...
...the rest aren't...
...Midwestern-ers are incredibly commonsensical...
...They Say you can't talk taxes to the American people...
...Everything they tell you makes you nod: "Yup, that's right...
...Was God his source...
...At the Lamar Lanes Bowling Alley in south Austin, most of the teams are from small workplaces—a garage, a cement company, a beer distributorship, a furniture repair place...
...If you go someplace that has visitors from all over the country—say, the Grand Canyon or Disneyland—there are two kinds of Americans that stick out...
...Florence King once pointed out that the typical Southerner: ¶ Brags about what a conservative he is and then votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...This may strike Yankees as a trifle odd, but all us Southerners shovel pig manure: It's a cultural requirement...
...Drink maple syrup or die...
...We live in a country of which Ronald Reagan has been President for more than seven years...
Vol. 52 • April 1988 • No. 4
