Holiday food fight

With Thanksgiving dinner over and the dishes done and Christmas dinner not yet planned, let’s have a conversation that guarantees a family food fight in Southern Illinois. Or at least it would in my family...

Transcript

Holiday food fight

With Thanksgiving dinner over and the dishes done and Christmas dinner not yet planned, let’s have a conversation that guarantees a family food fight in Southern Illinois. Or at least it would in my family.

I’m the product of a mixed marriage. Both my mother’s family and my father’s family have deep roots in Southern Illinois, that’s their commonality. But politically my mother’s family are largely rock-ribbed Republican tenant farmers. My dad’s family, labor, Roosevelt Democrats. 

I remember well riding, as a boy, in my Grandpa Dallas’ old green International pickup on a one-lane tarred country road on the way to work in the soybean fields he sharecropped. As we passed a fallow field growing naught but weeds, because it was in a USDA program which paid farmers not to grow crops, in order to support crop prices, he’d growl, “Look at them Kennedy oats.” Kennedy referred to then Democratic president John F. Kennedy. Oats a derogatory term for the unkempt weeds.

Even though the program was designed to aid farmers by keeping crop prices higher, he disdained them, thinking them “socialism”, a crime next only to drinking alcohol or breaking the Sabbath.

I have just as clear a memory of my paternal grandfather telling the black and white television set perched in the corner of their tiny shotgun house during the 1956 Republican convention, that nominated incumbent president Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term, that “only the Democrats are for the working man”.

Now, of course, both my grandfathers were “working men” and on the lowest economic rungs of our country, yet they held diametrically opposed political views. Surveys today show it would be unlikely for children from families with different political views to marry, yet my parents did. Maybe it was different back in the 1940’s.

My dad was a Kennedy Democrat, my mother, a Nixon Republican. She long claimed after the 1960 presidential election, that the Democrats stole the election in Chicago, delivering Illinois, with its rich slate of electoral votes, to Kennedy, thus insuring his victory in a very close election.

Any of this starting to sound familiar?

Perhaps because of this upbringing I could understand, or at least listen to both sides. Agreeing with policy points on each side and disagreeing with positions of each party. One of my prouder memories of my very short political career is when KMOX radio, which because of its coverage of the beloved St. Louis Cardinals, dominated the AM radio waves in Southern Illinois, labelled me the “most bi-partisan” of the eight congressmen who represented its bi-state listening area. 

Tall praise for a Democratic congressman from a radio station also nicknamed KGOP for its editorial stances and Rush Limbaugh programming.

Now I’ve started another dinner table fight. Calling the Cardinals “beloved”. Down here in Belleville and most of the rest of Southern Illinois they are beloved. The Cubs are hated as their arch-rivals. The only time we cheer the Cubs is if they’re playing cross league New York Yankees, an even more hated big city team.

As much as he loved Democrats, my paternal grandfather hated the Cubs. Disabled from a stroke in his fifties, he’d have one baseball game playing on the living room television set and another on the kitchen radio, paying close attention to both games. He’d be cursing the Cubs while cheering the Cardinals. Just as he cursed the Cubs, he didn’t care much for Chicago either. I don’t know that he ever visited the city, but that didn’t stop him from disliking it.

Dislike of Chicago, because of its domination of state politics, may have been the only thing he and my maternal grandfather agreed on. Like many downstaters, they reflexively disliked the big city’s dominant influence. Likely much like upstate New Yorkers dislike New York City.

Southern Illinoisans all too frequently feel abandoned by state government because of Chicago’s dominance. (Let’s start a really big fight here.) Maybe it’s time Southern Illinois go back to electing Democrats who can align with, and influence, those big city Democrats to help Southern Illinois. With a veto proof majority in the state legislature Democrats can, and do, effectively ignore Republicans.

Remember those giants of Southern Illinois politics past, like Clyde Choate and Paul Powell and Kenny Gray? They got things done for Southern Illinois. Okay, maybe mentioning Paul Powell with his shoeboxes full of money isn’t such a great idea, but then Illinois has a long, bi-partisan history of less than honest political figures. My point is that we need to elect public officials who can work to get things done for their constituents rather than political posturing and screaming at the other side. Let’s reserve our screaming for the ballpark.

By the way, my barber is a Cubs fan, but I still like the way he cuts my hair. For years he’s threatened during baseball season to cut the Cubs logo into my haircut. It’d have to be in the back now as thin as it’s getting on top.

(c) William L. enyart 2021
Reflections from the River
www.billenyart.com
Email: bill@billenyart.com