kay will travel

I am not referring to God with large biceps but there is certainly a correlation between strength of emotion about both these topics in the southern states of the US of A.

In Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi I spied odd combinations and contradictions:

• Conservative appearances of people – to the point where I needed to check my phone for the current century;
• public sale of fireworks including Artillery shells — balls containing pyrotechnic stars that are launched from a launch tube – this was quite shocking to us Aussies who only had a dim memory of being able to purchase anything but a sparkler;
• a world-famous whiskey distillery set in a county where its product is illegal to sell;
• an astonishing, tangible array of guns and ammunition available in the local supermarkets;
• billboards and products using loud, colourful and assertive promotion of god and religion.

In the small enclave of shops centred round the home of Casey Jones in Jackson, we stopped to have lunch of what seemed to me authentic and delicious southern cuisine – I had Chicken and dumpling soup and Will had Hobo soup, both served with corn cakes. The women in the café were extremely friendly although their very broad southern accents were a might difficult to understand and elicited some stifled amusement from me as I ordered. I certainly wasn’t expecting these females to have such an exaggerated drawl; look so homespun or so like the maternal figures in old black and white American tv shows such as My Three Sons and Donna Reid – or perhaps those white women in “The Help” – for those of you who are too young to know the former.

The Old Country Store here had what was described as “charming” Southern gifts but included two stands of hats that clearly defined the local feeling about being allowed to own guns and use them. Slogans such as “America’s Original Homeland Security” and “The Second Amendment – I will defend” – (along with beautifully embroidered images of a variety of patriotic emblems and guns to illustrate). I had to wonder whether the petite, grey-haired lady who attended to my purchase of a Casey Jones train whistle (made in China) for my grandson, shared those sentiments.

Where does the second amendment interact with the sixth commandment? Is it okay to murder if you are defending your property? Whether I was ready for it or not, the importance of religion and church-going was obvious in these parts.

There was a building of worship, sometimes grand and sometimes not, on many corners of even the smaller towns we passed through. And there were products the likes of which I had not seen before and some which were downright aggressive.

In Birmingham’s Walmart, squeezed between the gun and ammunition counter and the refrigerator packed full of 1 pound buckets of Dairy whip (which had no discernable traces of dairy product or for that matter natural substance of any sort) were racks of reasonably priced T-shirts.

Some of these were shameless calls to Christianity.

Another shirt which I desperately wanted to, but chose not to photograph (as I felt that I was being scrutinised by another customer who was probably only looking at me because of the anxiety on my face as I trawled the children’s section) – was one size 4 t-shirt which had an image of what I recognised as “Bob, the builder” with the text “The Lord made everything” written in upper case with an exclamation mark, the size of which belittled poor Bob!

Hmm.. in my opinion this is confusing bibles with balustrades and as I returned to my hotel room for the night, my final and awfully pun- ishable skepticism involved wondering just how constructive this product could actually be!