Country Humor

Nannies get my goat
By Jack S. Bray

I haven’t surveyed Native Americans lately, but I doubt that many Indians are really offended by college team nicknames like warriors, braves, chiefs and Seminoles. But sportswriters, campus diversity police and the National Collegiate Athletic Association believe they should be.

In fact, the NCAA has tried to ban from championship play college teams with an “abusive or hostile” nickname or mascot. That would squelch such symbols as “Chief Illini,” who comes out leaping and prancing when the University of Illinois team takes the field.

I don’t know if NCAA officials consulted any Indian tribes before the association came up with the rule. Probably not. This may be yet another case where non-natives decided what was good for Native Americans and lunged ahead with a ruling intended to lessen any potential insult to the thin-skinned.

There are any number of other examples of what might be called rampant do-gooderism. National nannyism has us surrounded, determined to look out for all of us, not just for Indians. Armed with well-intentioned but intrusive urges to protect us all from ourselves, the social police would ban smoking everywhere, including in private homes and vehicles. In schools, they would outlaw everything from dodge ball (too violent) to donuts (too fattening), and any game where scores are kept because the losers might be traumatized for life. We even see a form of nannyism in politics—term limits being one for instance, apparently an attempt to protect voters from sending scoundrels back into office.

California (not surprisingly) seems to be in the vanguard of much of this lunacy. For example, the state bans genetically-modified fish from home aquariums and the San Francisco building inspector sets stiff rules for dog-house construction. But the land of fruits and nuts has no monopoly on nannyism. A North Dakota bill would make it illegal for minors to drink before 8 a.m. on their 21st birthday. Apparently, the goal here is to keep young people from going out to get snockered at midnight on their birthday.

The obesity police are out in full force, too, and they want more and more rules on what people can find to put into their mouths. Listing the nutritional content of foodstuffs is probably a good innovation. But it’s not enough to advise consumers to count calories and eschew fatty foods. Now the noshing nannies are trying to force restaurants to serve smaller portions and candy makers to sell their wares in smaller packages. (Apparently, they never considered the fact that I can buy two Snickers candy bars). Sooner or later, the deli do-gooders will probably force potato-chip manufacturers to list the calories on each and every chip.

I hope the social police lighten up a little before long. I’ve lived a goodly number of years, making my own decisions about what I should do, wear, drink and eat. And, while those decisions might not agree with everybody, or even be in my own long-term best interest in every case, I don’t want to live my life according to some nosy nanny’s idea of what I should be doing.

Sense and pecksniffery
By Mitch Jayne

Charles Dickens came up with many interesting names that have stayed with us, like Scrooge, and a shiftless character named Wilkins McCawber—whose byword was “something will turn up.” And Dickens left us with another name that still haunts us—a guy named Seth Pecksniff.

Over the years, to be a “pecksniffer” has come to mean anyone who “pecks” or “sniffs” at what others accomplish. Pecksniffs are sure that their own knowledge is far superior.

Now, Missourians respect our experts, but we do have a tendency to resent anyone who shows one bit of contempt, ridicule or condescension toward people who are doing their best with “horse sense.” We can be shown but not intimidated, and that’s how we got our state’s famous motto.

Sometimes pecksniff stuff gets pretty funny. I recall an example when a psychology major, home from college, lectured a neighbor woman about swatting her four-year-old on the rear. “There are better ways to control a child’s inappropriate behavior,” she levied, “than to inflict pain.”

The neighbor woman, who had three children, sighed patiently, “Well, she was pulling the cord to get a hot iron down on her head. My mom always said, Better a little hurt now than a big one next.’”

Life on a farm has always brought the humor of pecksniff opinion close to home—the bureaucratic view so often missing practical, down-to-earth facts of daily life. Corporate thinking can mis-plan a whole crop, and weather, no matter how scientific the data, continues to break every rule that meteorologists construct for it. Despite “superior” knowledge to the contrary, moon signs have always seemed to work for gardeners as well as fishermen, and sometimes simple observation beats reading anything about a subject that has been analyzed (and sniffed at) by scholars.

An old man of my youth was unfamiliar with hydraulics, but despite all of his pecksniff detractors, kept finding dependable well water all of his life. He told us kids, “I don’t know much, but I have a peach limb that went to college.”

The funniest pecksniff story I know comes from the Ozarks, where I live. It seems that some years back, a goat raiser called his “game warden” (as some old-timers still call Conservation agents down here) to report that he thought a mountain lion had killed one of his goats. The agent, going on procedure, informed him that coyotes or dog packs probably killed his goat, since Missouri has no mountain lions. But the agent said he would come see about it. “Have you moved the goat from where you found it?” asked the agent. “I’ll need to look around the carcass for sign.”

“No, sir” said the old farmer, humbly, “it’s twenty-foot up in a white oak fork and I’m not limber enough to climb that high no more.”

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