"Garden and Gun"

 
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 13, 2013 11:08 pm    Post subject: "Garden and Gun" Reply with quote

A magazine I'd never heard of came to my attention in a book review recently, and I looked up its Website because I had trouble believing that there could be a magazine called Garden and Gun.

Well, there is. Headquartered in South Carolina, apparently, it celebrates the Southern way of life.

Guns and gardens. You'll find sections on hunting there, and you'll be able to buy products like a "handmade starter croquet golf set" for $550, a tweed dog bed for $180, or a women's tweed shooting vest for $485.

And you'll find out about what's going on in the trendier places in that splendid area of these United States, the Southland, also known as Dixie.

When I was a child in the south we began every school day singing "Dixie." The teacher would have been facing a classroom full of fifth-graders all acting out the words:

"Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland"

--whereupon each child raised one hand over the eyes and pretended to be looking far off into the distance.

You had to make fun of a song you were compelled to sing every day.

It was in either fifth or sixth grade that a required course was Arkansas history. A year of it, with a fairly hefty textbook emblazoned with the Arkansas flag, which was a variant of the Confederate flag.

That was many years ago. But even now
the South hasn't given up on fighting that old "war for southern independence." Funny thing but I heard that it was over, and the North won.

But maybe it was just a rumor.

Meanwhile we still have the South, armed to the teeth and ready for just about anything.

A sample item from Garden and Gun:


Quote:
West Virginia

If It Don't Move, Eat It

Marlinton, West Virginia, is a very special place, and not simply because it is a Blue Ridge Mountain garden spot and farming village. It's for two reasons, really. Being as mountainous and nobly wooded as it is, thus having beaucoup critters in the woods, the state of West Virginia legalized the eating of roadkill some ten years ago.

The second reason Marlinton is a special place is that immediately after the legislature legalized the eating of roadkill, the citizenry thought it would be a good idea to institute an annual Road Kill Cook-Off. And that ferocious competition, attended by dozens of cooking teams from across the South, has now been folded into the city's Annual Autumn Harvest Festival, this year in its twenty-second year, on September 27.

The judges' grading curve--in other words, the form the judges fill out in assessing each dish--gives us the full flavor of the contest, so to speak. The judges state that the animals need not have been killed by vehicles, although they can be. More important, there are points awarded for ""originality,"" meaning, say, that a king snake jambalaya is--purely on the level of boning required--an ambitious undertaking and, regardless of how the dish tastes, is to be rewarded for the almost French level of labor involved.


Is the South still as keen on guns, killing, and death as it was when lynching was such a popular pastime?

I know some very nice southerners. But taken as a whole, the South has a lot to answer for.

I'm a keen fan of Jim Hightower of Texas. I was an enthusiast for Barbara Jordan and Molly Ivins, both of Texas. The South has come up with some outspoken people of courage over the years.

It needs more of them.
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