Incident at an Antique Store

[David Lockmiller]

(08-07-2014 03:47 PM)Wild Bill Wrote:  With apologies to Roger Norton, who has seen all this before. . . . I just could not resist:

Well, well, well, dog my cats and please pass the grits and greens! Someone is bucking for the Harry Reid award for stereotypical, condescending, politically-correct language. I guess it all depends on whose ox is getting gored?

You mean to tell me that the Yankees won the war? Mind ‘splaining why it took to 1964 until they won the peace, led by a Southerner? Next time you try to belittle those who still fail to see the New Birth of Freedom and its prime advocate, “Honest” Abe Lincoln the rail-splitter (or is it word-splitter) as the savoir and not the ruination of what the Founding Fathers wrought, be sure one of good ole boys in the pickup trucks with the loud pipes and Confederate flag flying from the radio antenna is not one of the recipients of yore Northern, holier-than-thou slander. I bet you thought we just plain could not read, huh? Nazism my foot!

There is an old story about the Southern gal who was sent to charm school to learn to say the word “fantastic” instead of “bull *****.” You ought to keep up with the more recent Lincoln historiography that finds him, his presidency, and his policies in peace and war less than noble. But i guess that that is impossible because your fawning adoration of, what was it Secretary of War Stanton (or was it General George McClellan) called him? --“the baboon in the White House," I believe. It’s all quite fantastic, isn’t it?

Well, y’all (you know the difference between y’all and all y’all?) will have to excuse me, good buddies, I have to go out and warm up the ole P.U. truck and hoist the Rebel flag, and hit the horn once real goooood, ‘cause it plays “Dixie.” Fantastic! Who’d a thunk it? Well, in all honesty, my door bell plays it, too, and it’s the ring tone on my cell phone. You Yanks shore do make some mighty fancy stuff!

Fantastic!

Excuse me for being so slow in returning yore e-mail. We do things a mite slow out thisaway. Did you know that Scarlett O’Hara was pregnant for 13 months in the first draft of Gone with the Wind? That damnyankee editor made Margaret Mitchell change it—even after she explained that the South was slow on everything. Makes you wonder where Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” come from. Bye now, hear?

William L. Richter (they do not call me Wild Bill for nuttin'!)
From the sovereign state of Louisiana
(hell, they even give me a collig degree from LSU! Shows you where education in the South has gone. Fantastic!)

I was watching the Ken Burns production on Mark Twain on PBS a week or so ago. I remember one part especially when the narrator read a portion from "Huckleberry Finn," toward the end of the book.

I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. or from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that *****'s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie,and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my trouble all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all gad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway ***** Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go hell" -- and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, and being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog. [The End]

I guess that President Abraham Lincoln went the "whole hog" on the slavery question. It was President Lincoln that created and implemented the Emancipation Proclamation. It was President Lincoln that created and got passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery forever in the United States of America. Fantastic!!! I reckon then that there is more than one definition of the word, fantastic. I prefer my definition in reference to the character and works of President Abraham Lincoln.