Take 1940 One

The pseudo-intellects, or "coffeelectuals", or "blackrimmers" as I call them (because of their glasses), needed no excuse to wear their scarves today. I sat from the cafeteria picking leftover friedness from Chick-Fil-A tin foil and watched the weather roll in. The clouds looked like chins on angry men when they've been driving too long without Paul Harvey. Or a P stop. They hit the breaks and realized there wasn't anything to stop them over the flat states—except that arch in St. Louis which they slid right under. The wind smacked the side of my face in Central Arkansas, forcing me to grab my glasses, my scarf... and run for coffee.

Comfortably inside my favorite antique store, I reflected on the irony of the whole town being rather antique. The price tag, however, on living here is breathing the fine dust that has kept the roads to the lungs, and the mind, closed from moving past 1965. I flipped through post cards in a shoe box titled "The Old South." Half of them were identical, featuring a red-lipped brunette straddling a Civil War cannon. She waves a rebel flag over her head, and has this grin like the war was yesterday... and yesterday was a dream that tomorrow will correct. But the cannon, it’s cracked and overgrown, and it looks through all of this—the photographer, the cut-offs—and pleads directly with me: Why are we doing this? Why can’t the south move on?

Moving on, I began looking through other cabinets and drawers for tin types when the Tuesday owner, the old wife of the Wednesday – Saturday owner, entered from what appeared to be a safe that Butch Cassidy and Sundance had robbed. All of that startled me into an ignorant comment about how the cold was back, to which she hammered: “It’s still winter.”

When will we learn that only meteorologists can have intelligent conversations about the weather?



I smelled the small booklet before I could bring it to visual range. The corner stuck out like a golden ticket underneath black and whites of ancient frowning couples—gender questionable. I love the smell of old, thick paper. It sends me into every attic I peered into as a child, every cat black coffee I wondered in at my reflection, and reminds me that there are still deeds—good and bad—that for whatever reason have been forgotten by the common fable.

I had found a Chicago Street Guide. Two of the front cover claims were instantly, but forgivably, wrong: the statement that it was free (tagged $1), and that it was the “latest” (the date was 1941). Inside was a listing of streets as well as, bizarrely, descriptions of current health problems ranging from sleeping disorders to social diseases—now known as STDs.

The writing was beautifully World War II in a font that seemed to match all of its upfront, black-and-white, legalistic ways. One hilarious example stuck out, titled “SEXUAL WEAKNESS.” Click the image to read.


I left the antique store and walked through the antique town holding the book up in front of my face like a comic to 1.) block the freezing wind and 2.) prevent the reminder that 2007 was still all around me. Grinning, I straddled a park fence, overgrown and cracking, waving my little treasure.

Then I wondered: Was I any different from the red-lipped brunette with her rebel flag and cannon?

True, the Civil War was a terrible blotch on our nation’s history and many of the social injustices it tried to combat still exist today (i.e. The symbolism the confederate “rebel” flag now assumes because of racists nearly a century after the war), but there were also many problems in 1941. Our “Greatest Generation” stood by nationwide segregation, unequal opportunities for women and immigrants, as well as the development of the largest mass-murder weapon in history—the atom bomb.

Was I celebrating hate, sexism, and violence by proudly displaying my Chicago Street Guide? Of course not. And besides, there are many aspects of an earlier America that are now tragically lost. The localized culture of 1850’s America, where each town had its own unique dialect and flavor, soul—now replaced by McDonalds and Starbucks coast to coast. And there’s something behind the honesty of the “SEXUAL WEAKNESS” article that used to lend our news and writing a certain energy—now watered down by political correctness in its aim to keep everyone as comfortable as possible.

I think back to the grinning Southern girl and the flag that represents her heritage—we are all apart of a similar heritage that should be openly celebrated and learned from. And for the cannon’s question, all I know is that the south can’t move on because… it shouldn’t have to.