This is President's Day Weekend. It used to be Washington's Birthday, but now it includes them all. I can't quite find out if Monday is a holiday. It seems to be for some. But some schools are cancelling it to catch up on the days missed because of snow.
Birmingham has a marathon today. Where I go for breakfast is one of the gathering points for spectators. This, no doubt, explains the black-tight convention last week. They do two laps, so it incorporates a half-marathon effortlessly. I wonder how many participants have an agonising 13th mile, wondering which event they are going to turn out to be in.
Having enjoyed the circus provided for my breakfast pleasure, I head back for serious roman emperor time. I settle back in my hot tub with the paper. This is a census year here. No doubt I will be compelled to play the tiniest part in it. I can't really complain. The US census is responsible for my entire career: the machines invented by Herman Hollerith to count the 1890 census created a set of companies which, in 1924, merged into IBM, which, forty years later, provided me with my first training in programming.
There are already projections about what the census will show. The newspaper has a long piece on population movements between the states. This affects the number of seats they have in congress. Alabama is going to hold its own, but the losers are going to be the North-East and the industrial Mid-West. The winners are the desert South-West and the sunshine South-East. But it looks like the big winner is going to be Texas.
One of my favourite Country and Western songs is "When I die I want to go to Texas" which I just love for its breathtaking arrogance. And my favourite film, "The Outlaw Josey Wales" is a (fairly faithful) adaptation of a book entitled "Gone to Texas".
"Gone to Texas" was written by a man called Forrest Carter, who wrote an even better book. [Perhaps, before you read on, you should read this wonderful book, which is quite short, especially if you enjoy what is now called 'creative non-fiction'.] The book is called "The Education of Little Tree". It caused quite a stir when it was published in paperback about six years after Carter's death in 1979.
It was (apparently) written as a memoir of a small boy brought up by his part-Scottish, part-Cherokee grandfather. Its success was due to the stir it created in what I will vulgarly call the 'ethnic industry' (I nearly, after so many years among the London Polyocracy, found myself saying "Effnick"). They should have been better educated. Carter took his first name from a Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
It actually topped the New York Times non-fiction best seller's list in 1991. Then the venial press teased out the truth: it had been written by Hitler while on a Summer holiday in the Carolina Mountains. No, I made that up: it had been written by - I can hardly bear to tell you this - it had been written by the - you're not going to believe this - [Did you stop and read the book before you got to here?] - it was written by the man credited with giving George Wallace his famous catch phrase "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", the creator of a paramilitary splinter group of the KKK.
Imagine you're in the Louvre. Imagine there is a picture beside the Mona Lisa, showing the same enigmatic smile. Imagine being enchanted by it. Imagine asking the curator who painted this wonderful picture. Imagine he points you at the little plaque beside it, which says "Eva Braun, by A Hitler". Is it still enchanting? Are you horrified it could be juxtaposed with the Mona Lisa?
You're getting some idea of the what happened in America twenty years ago. The New York Times moved it to the 'fiction' list. We view the fiction-nonfiction divide rather differently now. I am compelled to say it was a good book, before the controversy and therefore still is.
Later that night, it was All-Star Basketball in the Dallas Cowboys' stadium, which is one of the engineering wonders of the world. Apparently there were 108,000 spectators, indoors.
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