Tuesday’s column: Yes, Graham, Virginia is quite a state
My donation to 4th-grader Graham Smith, from Wellesley, Mass., for his report on Virginia.
Hi! My name is Graham Smith and I need help with my state report. I am in fourth grade and my school is in Massachusetts. I’ve been so lucky to get the wonderful state of Virginia. I am so excited to learn more about the Old Dominion state so please help me!
Most of the stuff we use to learn about the state is kind of lame so I want some really cool stuff to learn about your amazing state. Some of the things that would be nice to get is, this newspaper article, little souvenirs, post cards, maps, pictures, general information, or any other items would be useful. Nothing alive or that can rot. Thank you for all your help.
Sincerely
Graham Smith
Ms. Collins’ Class
Upham School
Wellesley, Mass. 02481
Dear Graham,
Thank you for asking. You are right to be thrilled with your assignment, because the Old Dominion is indeed an amazing state.
I’ve lived here almost 17 years, and it still amazes me every day. I promise that none of what follows will be lame. Or rotting.
Virginia has only one ‘G’ in it, but there are three Gs that are very important down here. The first two are God and guns. Most people love both.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that in Roanoke, there’s a church on almost every street corner. The worst traffic in town is on Sundays after services let out.
It would be a stretch to say there’s a gun store on every street corner. But just about anyone can legally walk around almost anywhere in Virginia with a gun that’s in plain view. The right to hunt is in our constitution.
Since July 1, Virginia has allowed concealed guns in bars, and just last week our attorney general ruled that carrying a concealed gun is OK in church. You need a permit to carry a concealed handgun, of course, but those are ridiculously easy to get. You can get one even if you’ve never touched a gun in your life.
The third ‘G’ is for gays. Many people in Virginia do not love them. Unlike Massachusetts, gays can’t marry in Virginia.
They’re also barred by the Virginia constitution from entering into marriage-like contracts. Even Utah allows those.
It’s also legal in Virginia to discriminate against gays in other ways. Some state universities had policies barring job discrimination against gays. But our attorney general wrote those colleges stern letters warning that those policies are unlawful.
It’s OK for gays to own guns, though — at least so far.
Next we will tackle the Civil War, which is a big deal here. As you may know, our state capital, Richmond, was also capital of the Confederacy.
Your Yankee teachers may have taught you the Civil War is over. That is not quite accurate. Down here, many folks are still fuming about it, 150 years later. Some still call it “the War of Northern Aggression,” spurred by Massachusetts businessmen who were jealous about the South’s inexpensive labor.
They will argue forever that the war was all about states’ rights rather than slavery.
Like in Massachusetts, there’s a lot of scientific research down here, especially at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
But lately, some scientists are being extra careful. They’re concerned that our attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, may investigate them for fraud if he doesn’t like their research results. He’s doing that right now with an internationally known climate scientist who moved to Penn State a long time ago.
One day, if Cuccinelli ever attains national office, he may do that in Massachusetts, too. In which case Harvard will probably move to Toronto.
Like most places, Virginia has some famous restaurants. One of the most famous is right here in Roanoke.
This landmark has only 10 seats, and it serves “chile” that is unlike any I’ve ever eaten elsewhere. Opinions of the stuff run the gamut; people feel as strongly about it as they do the the War of Northern Aggression.
The restaurant is called Texas Tavern, and I’m enclosing a TT bumper sticker, key chain, and fridge magnet for your report.
I know — it’s kind of weird that a famous Virginia restaurant is named after another state.
But hey, there’s lots that’s weird, and wonderful, about Virginia.
April 12, 2011 - 6:00 AM
You stay classy, Dan Casey.
Really? Chance to pitch the state and interest someone about Virginia and you give him politics? I will be also sending a letter to Graham’s school.
Ok we had a little argument around here about this. Is Graham real, is this letter real, was his letter real, or some combination thereof?
It’s a real letter (actually an email) we got at the paper.
Graham’s email may well be legitimate, but I think any sane person knows your response was aimed at us and not something you would send to a child. Pavlov is alive and well!
While I find your response funny and truthful, I hope that’s not what you actually sent to Graham!
I’m sure Virginia’s tourism groups and Chambers are grateful for your help promoting our great state.
I do love the line about Harvard moving to Canada.
I haven’t sent him anything yet. I’m sending him the key chain, bumper sticker and fridge magnet from Texas Tavern, a Virginia landmark.
And by publishing his name & address, I hope plenty more readers will be sending him other trinkets and their impressions of Virginia.
Don’t you think I should include the column?
Too bad he can’t take anything alive or that can rot…we could pack up Jack McGuire in his little Confederate uniform and send him up there.
Oh, and don’t forget to share about how we introduced slavery into the colonies, post-Civil War lynchings, massive resistance under Gov. Byrd, and our dalliance in eugenics. Oh, and how we’re allowing coal companies to level the Appalachians faster and flatter than the largest glacier ever could. Can’t leave out those chapters…well, unless your textbook comes from Texas.
Dang. I thought Christian Trejbal was still over on the editorial side. Or did you steal one of his columns?
This piece contains his two favorite memes. “Gays get screwed” and “SW Virginia sucks”.
Dan, someone should mention Saltville, the salt mines and the woolly mammoth and other interesting artifacts found there.
Dear readers:
I have decided to save time & paper by consolidating all future columns to the following, it will appear 2-3 times weekly:
Guns are bad.
Southerners are stupid.
Chile
Chile
Chile
Chile…..
Dan Casey
A 4th grader asks for info about our state and you choose to tell him about guns, war and homosexuality? Really Dan? I’m glad you pointed out to him that you aren’t a native Virginian. How embarassing. I’m glad he knows you aren’t from around here. Even for you, this is a new level of low.
Dear Graham,
You should come live in Virginia, m’boy. We won’t be going through your lunch and confiscating non-approved items, such as fruit snacks not packaged in the Unites States by union employees. Further, we allow cheering at our soccer matches, and we keep score at sporting events.
Your parents will be able to finally find jobs if they move here because business are moving here instead of leaving like you’re used to. Our state has been blessed with very strong fiscal leadership Also your parents won’t be forced to join a union. Instead, they will be able to stay on the job.
If your family goes to church, you won’t be discriminated against, here by godless people who don’t think there should be churches.
Another relative positive are the schools.
Although there are some falsehoods taught in our public schools, you should feel comforted that there are some lawmakers like our attorney general, fighting to keep crazy fairy-tale theories like man made global warming out of the educational system.
You are also will not be expelled from school if you bring a squirt gun to class or some other toy that bears some remote likeness to a real weapon.
Should you slip up and call a girl a name on the playground, your family won’t be sued for sexual harassment for millions of dolars trial lawyer because. We don’t have as many lawyers per capita in Virginia, thank God. Nor do we have as many godless idiots paying a fortune for a pi$$-poor education.
Our colleges and universities offer a few REAL majors. Not as many worthless degrees like “Medieval French Poetry” like you might find up there.
Your family will be able to take car trips once again since Virginia doesn’t have confiscatory gasoline taxes.
And speaking of driving, your family will be refreshed by the absence of rude obnoxious a-hole drivers who honk their horn at every half-second delay.
But the best thing about living in Virginia is most of your neighbors will hard-working conservatives — sane people. Relativelly few jobless animal-rights-tree-hugging-abortion-loving lunatics around here.
If you’re trying to escape leftwing insanity, it’s best not to read our local paper here, the Roanoke Times. You’ll think your back home.
Since your very vitriolic and politically left lying (not leaning) column appears in the Virginia section of the paper and not on the opinion page where it belonged…wait, it didn’t actually belong anywhere…my suggestion to you is to send Graham a very large box with you (and enough food stuffs to sustain you for some time, maybe a few TT chiliburgers) inside. Since you referred to Graham’s teachers as “yankee”, my suggestion to you as one of his potential teachers and as a new resident of Wellesley (given that they don’t refuse delivery of your box)is to let him know that there are yankees and there are “damn yankees”, the difference (in your case) is that yankees came and WENT BACK North.
Re: #’s 2, 3, 5, 6, & 7
+ 1 on your comments.
When did this group last agree on anything?
.
.
I think you need to tell Graham a little more about what you love about living in Virginia, Dan.
Morris,
Can I send Channel 10 down to interview you? Because they’re coming over here to interview me this afternoon, about Tuesday’s column.
Maybe that will be Thursday’s column, Lori.
#16 Actually, suzie, organizations like the Roanoke Star and the one out in south county (can’t remember the name) STRONGLY discourage loud cheering or exhortations at soccer games, sometimes even to the point of handing out sportsmanship ratings for fans (BlueRidge Classic League), not that that really means anything. I ignored those admonitions during the short time my son played for the Star.
@20 – Please tell me that is also not serious.
“Because they’re coming over here to interview me this afternoon, about Tuesday’s column.”
Have you met with AEP yet? Does anyone at that paper get as much backlash and general play as you do?
@ Sandi:
“Pavlov is alive and well!”
Actually, Pavlov is quite dead. Pavlovian support for Dan, on the other hand, seems alive and well
Just yesterday you urged an adult not to give Dan her personal information because of nuts on this blog. It’s hard to imagine why you are OK today with the publication of a 4th grader’s name and address, not to mention the use of an elementary school project as a prop to further one’s political goals.
Joke or not, Dan’s response is in pretty poor taste.
Whatever Dan is “ON” is not good.His column is not helping the papers circulation numbers to increase.
As in any state in the union, there will be widely diverse opinions as to what is great about that state, things that need improvement, etc.
CONGRESS can’t even agree, why should we?
That is the diversity we have.
Many different opinions, separately, but together make one great state, one great nation.
I met with Todd Burns of AEP this morning for coffee and a discussion. Unfortunately, I had a mouthful of java at one point, and I coughed with that mouthful, and I sprayed it all over him, the documents he gave me, and myself. So I had to go home and change for the TV interview.
The only problem there was, I couldn’t find my little red devil’s horns from Halloween. I wanted to wear them for TV.
The piece with me should be on Channel 10 at 6 p.m.
I did not print the 4th grader’s address. It was his school’s address. And he included it specifically so people could send him items about Virginia (which I’m doing, and I bet others are doing too).
Graham and his class are definitely real!
http://fc.wellesley.k12.ma.us/~Carolyn_Collins/
Loved it! Keep ‘em coming!
The “Pavlovian support for Dan” is no more “alive and well” than the responses he draws from certain people on a regular basis IMO.
Dan, we are so lucky to have had you here for the past 17 years, sharing your superior views and beliefs with us, the bass-ackwards people of SW Virginia. Who knows what kind of devolution would have occurred had you and others like you not tried your best to lift us out of our ignorance and stupidity. I assume your crusader identity; otherwise, why would such an obviously superior person such as yourself spend 17 years in such a fetid and antebellum swamp?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I hear the Dueling Banjo’s theme that tells me Deliverance is on TV. Think I’ll look through my SCV membership paperwork and clean some guns while I watch it.
Now act like you got some smart, why dontcha?
Re: #25
“Pavlovian support for Dan, on the other hand, seems alive and well.”
———-
Au contraire, seem to me most folk are taking him to task.
One thing you can say about Dan, he knows how to stir the pot.
We’ll be watching Dan. Wish I could’ve seen the coffee “malfunction”
BTW, Re: Dan’s “Civil War observation.”
Good read and links to others at:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2063679,00.html#ixzz1JLAt3MZo
**
The Civil War
The Way We Weren’t
By David von Drehle Thursday, Apr. 07, 2011
SNIP
Shortly before the Fort Sumter anniversary, Harris Interactive polled more than 2,500 adults across the country, asking what the North and South were fighting about. A majority, including two-thirds of white respondents in the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, answered that the South was mainly motivated by “states’ rights” rather than the future of slavery.
The question “What caused the Civil War?” returns 20 million Google hits and a wide array of arguments on Internet comment boards and discussion threads. The Civil War was caused by Northern aggressors invading an independent Southern nation. Or it was caused by high tariffs. Or it was caused by blundering statesmen. Or it was caused by the clash of industrial and agrarian cultures. Or it was caused by fanatics. Or it was caused by the Marxist class struggle.
On and on, seemingly endless, sometimes contradictory
SNIP
**
Wow, I really thought this was a “fake” piece. If I was that child’s mother I’d be pissed and writing a letter to your boss.
#16
Another classic by Suzie and funnier than the OP.
I’m so glad other states don’t have guns, churches, or homophobes and that it’s all nicely contained in poor ol’ Virginny. It’d be a shame if any other states were as imperfect as the Commonwealth.
I’m equally glad that pot-stirrers like this arouse the very sentiments they act as if they dislike. Fourth-grade inquiries apparently merit fourth-grade level sinking for attention whoring. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
“Graham’s email may well be legitimate, but I think any sane person knows your response was aimed at us and not something you would send to a child.” – Sandi Saunders
Dan, the channel 10 reporter said that you were sending the response to the child, then the story shows you telling the cameraman what else you are mailing him, supposedly along with the article. To be fair, it could be selective editing on the part of WSLS, as they never showed you saying one way or another.
Did you send or do you plan to send the column to a 4th grader?
Mike,
Sandi is correct that I wrote it for readers of The Roanoke Times.
However, I plan to send Tuesday’s issue (containing the column) to Graham, along with Friday’s issue (the big story was Salem Red Sox) a book about why kids love Virginia, a Texas Tavern keychain (Virginia landmarks series); a Texas Tavern calendar fridge magnet, and a TT bumper sticker. And maybe some other stuff like a map of the Blue Ridge Parkway
Who knows? There may even be another column in this — stuff I neglected to mention.
@ Dan:
I understand you wrote the piece for RT readers, that’s why you published it in the paper and online. Sandi also said that any sane person knows your response ‘is not something you would send to a child’.
While I agree with your stances on gay rights and the Civil War and think it’s great that you’re sending the young man some nice mementoes of Virginia, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that you used a 4th grade project as a prop to introduce ideas which should be strong enough to stand on their own. One of the few things you could do to make this worse is to send your response to a child.
I am sorry to see that Sandi overestimated you. In all candor, so did I.
Mike,
I would not respond to this kid merely by cutting out the column and mailing it to him, or emailing the column as a response.
But I plan to include Tuesday’s issue of the newspaper (which contains the column) in a larger package of material about Virginia. That include Friday’s front section (with the story about the Salem Red Sox), a book we had at the newspaper about what kids love about Virginia, some gimcracks from the Texas Tavern, and some other stuff. I might even include a map of the Blue Ridge Parkway.
My belief is the student will be thrilled at the pot he’s stirred/impact he’s had, and at all the Virginia trinkets & other stuff he’s going to get as a result — not only from me but from readers.
I am sure that the teacher is going to be screening this stuff, and that if she believes the column is inappropriate material she can pull it out before she gives it to him.
Dan, if you want to mail the paper or the column to the teacher, that is one thing. I do not think you should include it in the package to the kid. The class is bound to get many packages and the teacher may not even think to read the column before giving the package to the child. Certainly some kids are mature and even aware of satire at that age, but most are not.
Much as I loved the tweeking you gave us, I do not think it is appropriate or sporting to send that to a child. Children should not be exposed to this without parental supervision and guidance IMO. I did not think you would do that and I do not think you should do that.
Mike and Sandi,
What I’ve done is e-mailed the teacher, asked her to read the column online, and advise me whether I should include it in the package for Graham. Frankly I believe Massachusetts and Virginia elementary schools are also very different, with respect to the subject of gay marriage.
My guess is everyone up there has already read the piece in question.
Having had young children when I lived up north, I’ll say this. Very early on it was evident that they had friends with gay family members, partnered and single. And we started talking – early – about different families and different life choices, and how we treat people who live differently than we do (shockingly, we treat them just like everyone else!) But I’d hestitate before having that conversation with someone else’s child, or asking a 4th grade teacher to introduce a concept like same-sex marriage to a classroom full of kids who’ve barely learned about the Bill of Rights yet.
A public school teacher who does that is likely to be the subject of a lot of parent phone calls and a meeting or two with their boss.
As much of a fan as I am of snarky-snark, it would take a very sophisticated 9 year old to get the satire aspect of this piece.
Fair enough Dan, Thanks!!
Getting my packet together today.
If the teacher has one iota of sense, she’d run it by the parents whether or not to allow the kid to read the inappropriate column.
The kid made an innocent request, and in no way bargained for this kooky politicized leftwing rant. If I were the kid’s parent, I’d be heading to the microphones and saying this very thing, and if the teacher bypassed my permission and gave the article to the kid anyway, she, the principal, the superintendent, and I would be having a nice long conference, and I would be demanding a few heads. I would also fire off a letter to the Roanoke Times scolding them for allowing such a letter to be sent. I would ask them to keep their vile political beliefs, which are certainly in the minority, to themselves.
You might expect this kind of kooky stuff from a Massachusetts newspaper. You would hope for better from a Virginia one.
You know after seeing and hearing this I think Dan got it it right as to that question the reporter about talking to his kids about gays. Sometime I do not think we give kids the credit for thinking on their own.
A few years ago I organized a Earth Day celebration in Harrisonburg. And we had the kids write what Earth Day meant to them. This was done through the local TV station. We got about 40 letters from the kids and you would be surprised by what they wrote and how clear they were. The top 3 kids won a free Earth Day t-shirt.
The teacher got signed permission slips from the parents allowing the students to send the letters.
50 Getting my packet together today.
Good, UptheRiver. Let’s get the majority voice heard!
Uptheriver, some cool local microbrewery stuff might be welcome by the teacher, if not the students.