Notes from the road

       Steve Barnes

MOBILE, Ala. — There was a time when taking to the road could shift one’s view of current events, even reshape it or, at a minimum, alter perspectives on the state of the state, even the union. Drive a few blocks from Bentonville, for example, and you would learn that folks in Rogers had a different take on things, including matters that were broader in scope than their respective city limits. Forrest City might know one thing for sure, while Marianna had its doubts. Lonoke County might agree with, oh, Baxter County on next season’s Razorback prospects but first there were the Cardinals to assess, and the World Series to envision, and which bunch loved them best, and first? Just crossing the state line while remaining in one’s native region could put a different spin on things. No longer.

A friend emailed recently from a town near the southeastern Atlantic coast, his latest stop in a transcontinental odyssey he’d planned for years.

“Saw this across Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.,” he wrote, inviting me to click on a photo he had attached. It was a shot of a billboard that proclaimed “TRUMP WON!”

The Stolen Election theme: It is alive and well, and if not by any means restricted to the states of the Old Confederacy, it seems as likely to thrive in the consciousness of the American far right as lingers the legacy of the Lost Cause among Old Dixie’s never-surrender contingent. Myth is a powerful weapon in politics at every level, and it has molded public policy, particularly in the south, since Grant and Lee exchanged pleasantries at Appomattox.

The test for the governor just to the east of here, who would be Ron DeSantis of Florida, is whether he can persuade the Ever-Trumpers that ever is a long time, too long, and does not extend beyond the first of the coming Republican primaries and certainly not past November 2024. That will involve placating the considerable number of conservatives animated by the former president’s two previous campaigns. I am not a pretender, DeSantis is assuring them, but the real thing, as disdainful of the dreaded establishment, as prepared to drain the Washington swamp, as their hero — but unlike him, electable next year.

The question, a profound one for not only DeSantis but for Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson and the other Republicans who would unseat Joseph Biden, is whether any of them can return to the polls the bloc — the Ever Trumpers — that the previous GOP president summoned. Those TRUMP WON! signs across the south (and elsewhere) are a not so subtle reminder of the obstacle the Republicans who would claim their party’s presidential bid must overcome.

••• Margaret Renkl of Tennessee, perhaps the best observer of southern politics and culture today, writes of a different social dynamic, albeit one with an obvious undercurrent of public policy: environmental- climate change, and its effect on the south as we have lived it. It seems she and her husband were startled recently by a loud noise from their patio. Assuming at first it was the work of one of the raccoons or opossums that share their suburban Nashville neighborhood, they peered through a rear window to observe something neither had seen before in their city: an armadillo.

They will see more of them. Drought and development in the lower latitudes of the U.S. and central and south America are depriving the creatures of their native habitat and driving them steadily to the north. If you haven’t had your lawn ripped open by armadillos, stand by.

••• The hospice team told my friend’s wife that the end would come within three weeks at the outside. I had planned to return to his side, to spend another day with him and with his family, upon returning to Arkansas. But four days was the best that providence, or whatever, would grant him, and us. Her text message arrived at dawn last Friday, the sort of message you do not want to receive while on the road, in transit.

Hoyt Purvis was a native Arkansan, a journalist, a world traveler (more than 100 countries, some of which no longer exist), a public servant (he toiled on the staffs of Sens. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Robert Byrd of West Virginia), an author, an educator, a mentor. A shining star but never in the spotlight, he helped shape his native state and the nation. He was a husband and a father and a grandfather. He was a friend of more than 50 years, and a sometime colleague. He had no enemies.