Shrinking, violent

Living in Dixie, one can't help but notice how prolifically our youth pursue earnest missionary excursions abroad - to the Asian subcontinent, Africa - not merely to substantiate their noblesse in a foreign dalliance without entanglements, racking up foreign credits of portfolio-embellishing good works, and maybe expanding one's palate along the way. There is no presumptive hypocrisy in youth's innate impulse to do good, or even in its learned desire to be seen to be good. Is there a native necessity in the export of these shining motives and gestures?

It seems there can be no unambiguous act in a multi-tasking world - as ours has always been, despite the puff in this neologism. But I think the refrain, Look away, Dixie land contains happier and darker elements than that. I never saw such a habit for exporting Protestant good works beyond one's own neighborhood. I don't think it's because the Gothic horrors of the Southern economy and justice system are dismissed as more intractable, say, than Mumbai's. I think it's because it still isn't accepted as "nice" in Dixie, to embarrass the congregation. I've heard this deference described as "communitarian," as To Kill a Mockingbird turned 50.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union filed this week a Federal class-action lawsuit against the for-profit corporation which runs Mississippi's largest youth correctional facility. The link tells it all; there is no need for reciting redundantly, here, the allegations in the complaint. If there is anything else going on on this planet which exceeds the depravity detailed in that brief, I very much doubt that it will yield to the enterprising mission of an expatriate pro tempore. That every allegation in the lawsuit  attributes itself to an irresponsibly tax-averse society's out-sourcing of its highest duty, goes a very far way toward explaining why Southern children know so much about the Third World. They are expelled.
 

The adult abdication of the duty of due care, in the remedial incarceration of the young, splits a generation into two faces, exiling them both from each other. How long must this go on, down here? But I stray.

A binge commercial rite called "Thanksgiving" is about to descend upon us, and I grope for some suggestion for enduring it: undergraduates, throughout the South, volunteering to exploit every second of visitation available in that hellhole to check in on one's adopted brother.

Inheritance starts at home. The Walnut Grove Correctional Facility is right down Route 492 from Main Street. At every corner, one's never more than two blocks from Jesus.























Robin Jenkins
A Would-Be Saint
B&W Publishing, 1978©
Rugby, Hulton Deutsch Collection