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"Jonesboro, world icon"

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Jonesboro has now become a household word. It leads a BBC radio broadcast without an Arkansas modifier. On NPR and CNN and C-SPAN, they use it as the example of whatever point the talking heads are trying to prove. It’s in the vernacular.

Funny how a few weeks ago Jonesboro’s biggest claim to fame was being the home of a reasonably sized mediocre state university (possible lowered in mediocrity due to Arkansas’ constant stance as the 49^th state ["thank God for Mississippi"] in every category remotely education related). Of course, Mississippi’s Senators and Congressmen are pushing for the admission of Puerto Rico into the Union as soon as possible. Don’t get me wrong, I have a degree from that generic state university and I get a great thrill in tweaking the noses of my ivy-educated friends and colleagues while correcting their grammar or beating them at some trivia game. In fact, I learned a great deal there, much of which didn’t include drinking games and inventive ways to not pick up girls. Boys and girls, just don’t kid yourselves about how "special" that education was. We do mediocrity pretty damn well in Arkansas.

Anyway, the "crisis" in Arkansas or whatever title CNN gave to the tragedy du jour, made the whole state look like a bunch of yahoos. We all tote guns in our underwear, we all have irrational beliefs that God intervened personally into saving our son or daughter and we can’t string a complete sentence together without sounding like Gomer Pyle or Jed Clampett. "It’s not about guns," they’d all say. After all, it says in the 2^nd Amendment to Thessalonians 3:16 that we have the absolute, immutable right to have as many weapons capable of stopping a bull elephant at 70 yards as a Man (emphasis in the original scripture) desires. That and a dog, too.

The fourth largest city in Arkansas came out looking like Dogpatch. Certainly, I now know that most of these kids came from the "country" and that the school itself is near Bono, but the rest of the world assumes that’s how "big city folks" in Arkansas sound and act. A writer in the Arkansas Times commented "interviews revealed Jonesboro as a place where proper English language isn’t a municipal priority." And that was just the mayor and the sheriff.

Now I lived four years in Jonesboro and I know that the whole place isn’t rednecks in camouflage and preachers in starched white short sleeve shirts (though there is a Baptist Church of something or other on every other street corner). It’s a typical Southern college town where only the white people with money can get a drink without going "down the road."   It, like most of Arkansas, thinks the best thing to happen in years is when the Wal-Mart opened 24 hours a day. It only serves to remind me why I don’t slide through Arkansas very often.

Today, I call Boston home and, sure we have our share of idiots and abusers of the English language ("oh…my…Gawd! Wheah is he?), but there are a couple of folks here who don’t believe the NRA is looking out for our rights. I have found my people…

Certainly we can all grieve for what happened in Jonesboro. Perhaps some of you knew Shannon Wright or had other connections to the victims or near-victims at the school. "Jonesboro" is now a dirty word…a symbol of what’s wrong in America and the South. And that symbology stretches around the world. I always thought I’d be proud when I heard Jonesboro mentioned on the air….

Write Joe at: joseph.goss@sap-ag.de