My fallback position – my only position – used to be that nothing we did at the ballot box mattered. Nothing we shouted in the street or wrote in our letters to the editor. Phone banking, door-knocking, meetings with elected representatives, all of it a waste of time. The system available to us, it seemed to me, was the political equivalent […]
A friend tells me about the time he was having drinks with a couple of Texans who seemed unremarkable until the topic turned to high school football. “Those people were crazy,” he says. “I mean, absolutely nuts.” A fair appraisal, if H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is accurate. Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote Friday Night Lights after taking a leave of absence from The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988 to […]
Here’s what I remember. I’m in a small town. By small, I mean Mayberry small. And like Mayberry, it’s of a certain era. Cute and cozy. Surrounded by trees. It’s connected to the rest of the world by a twisty-turny two-lane road and a train track that leads to a depot where a crowd is gathering. Typical […]
