A little flimflam in town

Oxford, Miss., the home of Ole Miss, is a place at ease with itself. If only the northern media elite could reconcile Oxford with something beyond their own racial terms, the nation could move forward. As they rail against prejudice in others, the media choose to see Ole Miss framed in their own preconceived narrative of police with fire hoses and German shepherds -- or worse, Fox's Shepard Smith.

The upside is that their misperceptions of the South keeps them from moving here, which will make it more enjoyable for those of us here.

When it hosted the first presidential debate, Ole Miss proved that it is a different place now. Who would have imagined that a young black male really wanted to come there and an old white ex-military guy was seemingly afraid to visit?

Although the press was all bowed up and ready to be offended, they had to look harder than they had imagined to report on perceived evil in Oxford.

The media, bent on living in the past and keeping racial anger alive, could only point to James Meredith, the young black student who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. What upset them the most was finding that Meredith had not become an angry liberal like themselves after what must have been an extraordinarily difficult experience. Instead, he became a Republican. Instead of letting "race" define him, Mr. Meredith has moved on (with no .org after it), which explains why you have not heard much about him since.

That, to the liberal media establishment, is the ultimate injustice: not respecting them for past wrongs done to you.

I have a child at Ole Miss and one at Vanderbilt, so I was there for the football game the weekend before the debate. I saw the city all ready and proud to host this historic event. Then, when McCain decided to go to Washington to see what was up with the economy and Obama was forced to follow, the debate was in jeopardy.

It seemed curious that these two senators went back to D.C. to act concerned about the goings-on there, since they have hardly been there in the last two years leading up to this mess, which they helped create.

Both candidates, who have never held a private sector job or run a business, rushed back to opine and look presidential on the $700 billion subprime mortgage bailout. I guess the thinking there is: Who best to put out the fire if not the arsonists who set it?

Sitting around a big table with still-President Bush and a whole lot of accomplished businessmen (I worked at Goldman Sachs with Hank Paulson; we are lucky to have him serving as Treasury secretary) did not make for the photo op they had imagined. With Obama and McCain at the table with Paulson, it looked like the chairman of the company called in the bratty kids who had made a lot of bad financial choices to tell them what was going on with their trust funds.

Mission unaccomplished in Washington, they headed to Ole Miss to debate. Mississippi is an interesting state. It is 62 percent white, 38 percent black and has one Muslim guy who is afraid to leave his house. Oxford is a town that has gotten well past race and exists in that comfortable, college town world of authors, professors and the idle rich. The class order there is determined top to bottom by one's degree of idleness. And no one segment of society speaks more for the "working man" than those with no apparent means of support.

Like many Southerners, I like hanging on to some of my roots. Just because I almost tear up when I see a video of Elvis singing "Dixie" does not make me a racist.

As we know, liberals cannot be racists even though they talk about every issue in terms of race. Of course, conservatives, by definition, are always racists. I do not accept that premise set forth by the liberals, and neither should you.

The reality is that the South has made better racial progress than the North. I really believe Yankees find it easier to point to perceived issues in the South to deflect their own racial tensions.

Oxford and Southern gentility are nothing about which we should be ashamed. At least we teach our kids manners and we pull over to the side of the road for a funeral procession.

Ron Hart is a libertarian columnist. E-mail: RevRon10@aol.com.