GREAT OLD ARTICLE: "Taming The Tongue" by LUKE RADER

Albie's Note:  I found this fine article in the on-line back issues of THE HERALD OF HIS COMING newspaper and decided to put it on my blog.  I had heard of the old-time preacher Paul Rader but never of his brother Luke, but I found a bio of him on the great Wheaton College Library site:

Luke Rader  was born in 1892 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the son of Daniel L. Rader. Daniel was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Denver, Colorado, where his children grew up and attended college. Luke Rader emerged from college as an agnostic, but was led back to the faith of his parents after the birth of a son impressed on him the responsibility for spiritual guidance of his children.
Luke became a successful evangelist-pastor working in the River Lake Gospel Tabernacle in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a similar ministry to that of his more famous brother Paul, who was pastor of Chicago Gospel Tabernacle from 1921 to 1933. He was a forceful preacher, particularly interested in prophecy, whose ministry was primarily centered in the Tabernacle rather than in itinerant evangelism, though he did preach occasionally in Chicago at the Gospel Tabernacle. Rader's fine singing voice was a particular asset in his work, which also included a radio ministry. He died in Minneapolis in 1952.

In any case I was very convicted by these words about controlling one's tongue, which probably date from the 1920s. Good reading.

We are rapidly approaching the time when "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad" (2 Corinthians 5:10).
 

    None of us for a moment would think of taking a dagger and going among our brethren, slashing, cutting, and stabbing whoever of them crossed our path, yet the harm so inflicted upon them would not be nearly as damaging as that which our tongues constantly inflict upon each other.

    Here you will be inclined to lay this article down, and sidestep facing this fault in your own life. Don’t do it. Face the issue. There is too much at stake in the careless use of our tongues. Dodging the issue is dangerous and costly both to ourselves and to others.

    In one church, some years ago, over three hundred people withdrew their fellowship because of a falsehood circulated by one woman. Only God can estimate the damage done, first to His work in the church, and second to those who withdrew; for as far as can be learned all but about fifty have cooled off, backslidden and some even gone back into outbroken sin. True, they should have investigated the story before believing it, but when reputable people repeat a tale, even a lie takes on the respectable clothing of truth. The more favor and honor God showers upon us, the more weight our words bear.

    With us Christians, what we could do as slaves of sin, we dare not do as kings and priests of God, lest we divide Christ’s Body, harm Christ’s prestige, and mar Christ’s plan.

    We need to be especially on guard against evil speaking when we are going through a hard testing, a time of chastening, for then it is easy for discouragement, resentment, and bitterness to get into our souls. In such times of heaviness, everything seems dark, faith is hard to grasp, and our bitterness may flare out to defile many. By such careless unbridling of our tongues in backbiting, we leave our proper place of trust and fellowship with God as priests in the Holy Place.

    Evil speaking and criticism are sure evidences of conceit and pride in our hearts. They spring from an assumption of superiority and mastery which exalts us to the position of judging others. As James puts it, "Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law; but if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge" (James 4:11).

    Any careless talk, any bitterness hinders the Holy Ghost and His work. Paul says: "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice; And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you" (Ephesians 4:30-32).

    Our unguarded talk not only embarrasses the Holy Ghost and hinders His work, but it denies the very love He is endeavoring to produce in us.

    Evil speaking (criticism, gossip, scandal mongering, backbiting) works more ill to our neighbors than all other things combined, dishonors God, grieves the Holy Ghost, and brings disrepute to the name of Christ. It does no good to us, to others or to God; it is evil and no good is in it.

    Evil speaking and criticism not only work ill to others and grieve the Holy Ghost, but also do us infinite harm. We are in a battle. In war, the watchword is "Watch." "Be on your guard constantly." One of the most effective tricks in fencing or boxing is to get the opponent’s attention on something else for a second, and then strike him. This is also one of Satan’s favorite devices. While watching others’ faults, our own are forgotten, to Satan’s delight.

    Christ’s most stinging irony is: "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote (splinter) that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam (4 x 12 plank) that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye" (Matthew 7:1-5).

    When our brethren offend us, instead of backbiting them, we do as we are commanded: "Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and he alone; if he shall hear thee thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church; but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican"-- Jesus (Matthew 18:15-17).

    Paul sums the matter up in this glorious promise: "Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect, in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is well pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen" (Hebrews 13:20,21).

 27 He that hath knowledge spareth his words: and a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit. 28 Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

-- Proverbs 17:27,28

PEACE

SATURDAY COMEDY SHOWCASE #1: Bob Newhart in "STOP IT!"

Albie's Note:  He is now such an American  television "sit-com" fixture that it's almost hard to think of Bob Newhart [born 1929, now 84 years young] as a stand-up commedian, yet that was exactly what catapulted him to fame in the early 1960s.  In that early original form, Newhart's stand-up was different from nearly everyone else's as his laughs were generated almost entirely by an amazing sense of comic timing.  His first hit "Buttoned Down Mind" albums featured mainly his side of gag phone calls, a premise which would probably have fallen completely flat in anyone else's hands. If you ever see any of his TV shows, notice how often [virtually EVERY episode in his '70s "pschologist" show] the scripts place him on the telephone, and how often he generates voluminous audience laughter with this simple device.

Here, in a 2001 skit from  the show MAD-TV, Bob-- playing a psychiatrist again-- uses that same amazing comic timing as he explains a radical new therapy.  It's really quite simple.

 

"This is not Yiddish, Katherine, this is English!"

 

 

  

PEACE

RANGER AL's WESTERN COMIX THEATRE #4: "The Slayer Of The Grizzlies," 1950

Albie's Note:  It's a classic purportedly true tale of "man vs. beast" from Hillman Publishing's "all-true" comics title DEAD-EYE WESTERN #11, Aug.-Sep. 1950.

As our hero Sam Stevens says: "You made it personal when you killed my horse!"

Great artwork in this late Golden Ager... Enjoy!

[Couldn't resisit adding some other "Bear Art," too.]

 

 

 

The cover of  issue #11

 

 

BEAR ATTACK

by

Frank Leonard Stick
(1884-1981)

OUTDOOR LIFE cover, Jan. 1938

 

...and of course one Bear Hunting Whiskey ad

[Canadian hootch, natch] :

 

 

 

 PEACE

BIG AL's JOVIAL JUKEBOX #27: "Whatever Happened to Randoph Scott?" by THE STATLER BROTHERS, 1974

Albie's Note: Although I was born late [1964] to be a probable fan, I LOVE what are now called "B-westerns," the Matinee fare that dominated rural boys' and girls' cinematic viewing habits at hinterlands film theatres from the 1920s to the 1950s.   Say what you want about this whole celluloid mythology... at its core it was truly allegorical... by this I mean that these films were really fables about good vs. evil, and they consistently taught respect for fellow human beings as well as the "minding of one's own business." 

No wonder Hollywood got rid of westerns!!

Now... a lot of people have made loving tributes to these films, but the very greatest nod may well have been this Top 30 Country song from back in  1974.   Behold The Statler Brothers great single "Whatever Happened to Randoph Scott?":

Everybody knows when you go to the show
you can't take the kids along.
You've gotta read the paper and know the code of G, PG, and R, and X,
and you gotta know what the movie's about
before you even go.
Tex Ritter's gone, and Disney's dead,
and the screen is filled with sex.

[CHORUS]

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
ridin' the trail alone?
Whatever happened to Gene and Tex,
and Roy, and Rex, the Durango Kid?
Oh, Whatever happened to Randolph Scott,
his horse plain as could be?
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
has happened to the best of me.
[ guitar ]

Everybody’s tryin' to make a comment
about our doubts and fears.
True Grit's the only movie
I've really understood in years.
You gotta take your analyst along
to see if it's fit to see.
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
has happened to the industry.

[CHORUS]

Whatever happened to Johnny Mack Brown,
and Alan "Rocky" Lane?
Whatever happened to Lash LaRue?
I'd love to see them again.
Whatever happened to Smiley Burnett,
Tim Holt, and Gene Autry?
Whatever happened to all of these
has happened to the best of me.

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
has happened to the industry.

 

PEACE

 

RANGER AL's WESTERN COMIX THEATRE #3: Arizona Ames in CRACK WESTERN #63, 1949

 

Albie's Note:  Quality Comics was a superior outfit most famous today for producing Jack Cole's legendary PLASTIC MAN, and Will Eisner's  BLACKHAWK and THE SPIRIT  in their  original runs.   Interestingly, they seem to have produced less Super-hero titles than they did War, Western and Adventure fare.   They had a comic book called CRACK COMICS which ran for 62 issues from 1940 to 1949, when suddenly-- probably to cash in on the Western craze caused by Hopalong Cassidy and early Television-- they changed the title to CRACK WESTERN with issue # 63.

 

That  first western issue feature a lead-off story starring Arizona Ames, a blatant use of a title character's name from a popular Zane Grey novel of 1932.   They couldn't have hoped to get away with this for long-- and they didn't... by issue #66 their character's name was conveniently changed to Arizone RAINES for the remainder of his run [Was this a sly nod to the great early western writer William Mcleod Raines?? I certainly like to think so!]

Oddly , I really liked their interpretation of ol' "AZ Ames."  When I found and read his tales on the marvelous Digital Comic Musuem, I felt they had  a colorful B-western flair that was kinda legit and cool in its own way!   See if you agree...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just for fun, here is a cool Lionel Trains ad from the same issue:  

 

 

 

PEACE

 

GUEST ARTICLE: "Kerouac The Conservative" by Robert Dean Lurie [Great!]

 

 

Albie's Note: If you know me at all, you probably know I love Jack Kerouac   [March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969], the Beatnik, poet, "docu-novelist," raging alcoholic, Catholic visionary from Lowell, Massachusetts. 

 

I was having a discussion in a bookstore once, in Bisbee, AZ, with a very "artsy" young female friend of mine  [about 2006, i think] and I happened to mention to her that one of my all-time favorite novels remains BIG SUR by Kerouac.

 

"Kerouac?"  She gasped. "You? Mr. Conservative?  What could you possibly like about Kerouac??"

 

"Well," I replied.  "Have you read much Kerouac?"

 

She admitted she had never actually read one of his works.

 

"You might try reading him." I said.  "He may not be exactly what you expect."

 

Let me add this: To this day I like the term "Beatnik," though-- as you may know-- Jack himself hated it.  He felt the media was turning his Pacifist/Catholic vision [he prefered the term "beatific"] into a joke, which they no doubt were. 

 

Me?  I actually like the crassness of it. It sort sort of rings true with my more Protestant/ Libertarian synthesis of many of the same ideas.  Recently I was asked by email:

 

"Do you really think you should call yourself a beatnik?" 

 

I replied-- in part-- that: "I actually consider myself a "Kerouac Beatnik," and the first word in that is a VERY important distinction."

 

The following excellent article, first published in the September 2012 issue of THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE magazine, does a much better job of explaining it than I ever could.

 

Good Reading!

 

 

 

KEROUAC THE CONSERVATIVE

by

Robert Dean Lurie

Beat novelist, Catholic, Republican—do you know Jack?

 

Someone’s gonna give you wings
You’ll think it’s what you need
You’ll fly, man, you’ll be so high
But your history acts as your gravity

—Joseph Arthur
 

For someone who documented just about every moment of his life in torrents of breathless, “spontaneous” prose, Jack Kerouac—the late author of On the Road, Big Sur, and other stream-of-consciousness, hyper-autobiographical novels—remains surprisingly up for grabs ideologically. The hippies claim him as an inspiration, as do many western Buddhists; a biography called Subterranean Kerouac attempts to out him as a homosexual; a new film adaptation of On The Road starring Kristen Stewart opens the door for the Twilight generation; and I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t more than a few Occupy Wall Street protestors hunkering down in their tents with battered copies of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums stuffed in their jacket pockets
.
Each of these groups is absolutely sincere in its self-identification with Kerouac. Each sees its concerns and agendas reflected in his roiling ocean of language. Yet this bopping, scatting, mystical jazz poet who almost singlehandedly willed the 1960s counterculture into being was himself a political conservative and a Catholic.

How can this be?

The key to understanding Kerouac lies in a close examination of his roots, for it was in the small French Canadian community of Lowell, Massachusetts that the future author was inculcated with the values that would carry him through his life. He did indeed go on to lead a wild existence filled with alcohol, drugs, and perpetual shiftlessness; he fled from monogamy as from leprosy. Yet one cannot grasp the soul of Kerouac unless one understands his fundamentally traditional core. He never wished to foment a revolution. He did not desire to change America; he intended to document, celebrate, and, in the end, eulogize it.

Jean-Louis (“Jack”) Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, the son of French Canadian immigrants. His father Leo, like so many immigrants, fiercely loved his adopted country. This belief in the land of opportunity remained with him even after his Catholicism lapsed in the wake of devastating business failures. Jack’s conservatism, like his father’s, was the conservatism of the old ways: of hard work and even harder drink, of big blue-collar families passing down oral traditions. Above all, it was a conservatism of the natural world: of the large, solid, protective trees, of the perpetually roaring Merrimack and Concord Rivers—all combining to cast that crucial illusion of unchangingness that, in the best of circumstances, cradles and fortifies a soul for its journey beyond childhood.

Late in life Kerouac would tell William F. Buckley Jr., “My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.”

This had nothing to do with party planks and everything to do with family identity, with holding onto something, no matter how arbitrary, in an otherwise disorienting world. We’re Kerouacs and this is what we do.

Hand in hand with the politics was the Pre-Vatican II Catholicism that saturated Lowell’s tight-knit French Canadian community. Gabrielle Kerouac—Jack’s mother—matched Leo’s civic pride with a fervent religious faith, which if anything intensified after the death of Jack’s older brother Gerard, whom Jack would later eulogize as an unheralded saint in the novel Visions of Gerard. This was that majestic, fearsome Catholicism that now exists purely in the realm of imagination for most modern practitioners: the Catholicism of the Latin mass, of all-powerful priests, of God as the unknowable, awe-inspiring other. To New England’s mostly impoverished French Canadians, the Catholic Church served as de facto government, educator, extended family, and cultural arbitrator. Perhaps as a result of this spiritual immersion, both Gabrielle and Jack saw signs of God and angels everywhere.

“The Catholic Church is a weird church,” Jack later wrote to his friend and muse Neal Cassady.

“Much mysticism is sown broadspread from its ritual mysteries till it extends into the very lives of its constituents and parishoners.” It is impossible to overstate the influence of Catholicism on all of Kerouac’s work, save perhaps those books written during his Buddhist period in the mid-to-late 1950s. The influence is so obvious and so pervasive, in fact, that Kerouac became justifiably incensed when Ted Berrigan of the Paris Review asked during a 1968 interview,

“How come you never write about Jesus?”

Kerouac’s reply: “I’ve never written about Jesus? … You’re an insane phony … All I write about is Jesus.”

In truth, Berrigan ought to have known better. But casual readers can be forgiven for failing to grasp the religiosity in Kerouac’s writing. After all, his version of Christianity esteemed visions and personal experience over doctrine and dogma. He felt a special affinity for such offbeat souls as St. Francis of Assissi, St. Therese of Liseux (“The Little Flower”), and Thomas Merton, all of whom to some extent de-emphasized legalism in favor of a direct union with God. Beyond the confines of the Catholic Church, the influence of the painter and ecstatic poet William Blake loomed just as large and perhaps fueled Kerouac’s disregard for what he perceived to be restrictive sexual mores.

 

Of course, Kerouac is best known not for his lovely Lowell-centered books but for On the Road, a breathless jazz-inflected torrent of words initially typed out onto a “scroll”—actually hundreds of pages of tracing paper taped together and fed continuously through his typewriter—during one epic coffee-fuelled writing session in 1951 and ultimately published in 1957. The book, now considered an American Classic, documents the author’s real-life adventures traipsing around the country in his mid-20s with friends Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady who, together with Kerouac, would comprise the core of “The Beat Generation,” the last great American literary movement. Much drinking, drugging, and fornicating ensues over the course of Road’s 320 pages. Not surprisingly, these prurient elements did not endear Kerouac to the mainstream right of his time, which irked the young author, as he felt NO affinity for the left.

He never saw the impartial documenting of his own reckless youth as license for others to drop out of society. If anything, the downbeat ending of Road, in which Kerouac actuially predicts the frantic, kicks-obsessed “Dean Moriarty’s” (Neal Cassady’s) eventual slide into oblivion, as well as his unflinching depiction of his own nervous breakdown from alcoholic excess in the follow-up novel Big Sur, make quite clear the inevitable outcome of a “life on the road.” But Kerouac should not have been surprised by the right’s reaction; this was, after all, not conservative writing. The books did not follow the established standards of the novel and, in reality, were not novels at all but something else entirely: “confessional picaresque memoirs” (a phrase coined by Beat scholar Ann Charters), with the names of the participants changed to avoid accusations of libel. The conservative critics, missing the deeper themes of loneliness and the yearning for God, lambasted Kerouac for encouraging delinquency, while critics of all stripes complained about his sloppiness and occasional incoherece.

These commentators had a point: as novels, the books could be frustratingly uneven. Readers often found themselves bewildered by the sheer number of characters drifting in and out of the pages, unable to keep track of all the “mad ones” that Kerouac strained to include in his storylines. Why, the critics wondered, couldn’t Kerouac simply create a few composite characters embodying his friends’ most noteworthy traits? By any standard such an authorial modification would have vastly improved the readability of the books.

But that was not Kerouac’s aim. He wished to capture the truth, his truth, as best and as purely as he could. And he wanted to do this spontaneously, like a jazz musician wailing on his horn during an onstage improvisation. Revision, in Kerouac’s eyes, would only dilute the purity of the original performance. Furthermore, since he viewed his writing vocation as rooted in the Sacrament of Reconciliation: revision was tantamount to lying in the confessional. It might have have resulted in better novels, but they would no longer have been “spontaneous” and “true” novels. And it is the spontaneity and the emotional truth of these books, more than anything else, that continue to speak to readers.

It’s easy to approach On the Road with cynicism: an almost rapturous naïveté, or idiocy, permeates throughout. Yet this wide-eyed quality is actually one of the book’s great strengths; it evokes the exhilaration of being young, of leaving home for the first time and venturing out into the wider world with an open heart and credulous mind. Kerouac had the beguiling ability to find the admirable and holy in every soul he encountered on his travels, just as he had seen angels and the Holy Mother emerging from every corner in Lowell. And who has not experienced the sweet rush of moral transgression or the anguish of having to accept the consequences of such behavior? On the Road captures those emotions expertly.

Kerouac’s self-destructive nature, which led to his premature death from alcohol-induced hemhorraging, is perhaps the most curious aspect of his life story. Why would a man who worked so relentlessly at his craft, who endured 15 years of obscurity and rejection before his triumphant breakthrough, and who seemed to derive blissed-out enjoyment from even the most mundane aspects of life methodically destroy everything he had worked so hard to attain?

The answer may lie in a combination of near-crippling shyness and the very emotional openness that gave his writing such warmth. A fundamentally quiet, sensitive soul, Kerouac was woefully ill-equipped for the spotlight and had very little tolerance for criticism. Alcohol bolstered his confidence to speak in public and partially anaesthetized the sting of the many bad reviews his books received. Yet it was not enough. His friends watched helplessly as he barrelled onward to his demise, spurred ever faster by the hostile media.

As the apolitical Beat Generation metastasized into the heavily politicized hippie movement, Kerouac’s despondency and sense of alienation deepened. “I made myself famous by writing ‘songs’ and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness too,” he said in a heated exchange with political activist Ed Sanders on Buckley’s “Firing Line.” “You made yourself famous by saying, ‘Down with this, down with that, throw eggs at this, throw eggs at that!’ Take it with you. I cannot use your refuse; you may have it back.”

He allowed political differences to play a part in the demise of one of his greatest friendships. “I don’t even particularly wanta see [Allen Ginsberg],” he wrote his friend John Clellon Holmes in 1963, “what with his pro-Castro bullshit and his long white robe Messiah shot. … He and all those bohemian "beatniks" round him have nothing NEW to tell me!”

This was a one-sided breakup. Ginsberg, by then a famous poet, remained intensely loyal to Kerouac even after Kerouac started publicly denouncing his old friend and hurling anti-Semitic insults in his direction. Ginsberg was wise enough, and big-hearted enough, to understand that Kerouac’s flailing out at him was a symptom of much larger issues.

 

Kerouac’s sad final years were spent in an increasingly frantic quest to find a true home for himself and his mother. On an almost yearly basis he oscillated between Florida and New England, always following the same cycle: purchase a home, move in, grow restless, sell it; purchase another one, move in, sell it; and so on. Tragically, even when he returned to Lowell for a brief time, he found that the nurturing community he had written about so fondly for so many years now existed only in his books. He yearned, as the fictional Odysseus had during his wanderings, for the familiar, for something real and stable in his life. His mistake lay in looking for these things outside of him. Nevertheless, that desire is a good, true, worthy desire, and it permeates all of Jack Kerouac’s writing.

It is the reason why that Beat Movement could not last.

Allen Ginsberg, the poet visionary, pined for utopia and spiritual revolution.

William S. Burroughs, the outlaw libertarian, pined for anarchy and gay liberation.

Neal Cassady, the exiled cowboy, pined for girls and cars.

Jack Kerouac, the mystic, pined for God and Home.

 

Robert Dean Lurie

is the author of No Certainty Attached: Steve Kilbey and The Church.

 

 

 

 

PEACE

 

BIG AL's JOVIAL JUKEBOX #26: "I Am A Town" by Mary Chapin Carpenter, 1992

Albie's Note:   If you've ever lived in the small-town south for any period of time, you'll probably understand this great song by the great MCC, who I actually had the priviledge of seeing in concert in Fayetteville AR back in the Year Of Our Lord 1989, when she was yet to hit the Country Music big-time.  She was one of the most amazing, captivating performers I ever saw in person, and I have seen a good bit of live music in my day.  Her music is full of great poetry and beautiful sound. From 1992, here is the truly great "I Am A Town:"

I'm a town in Carolina, I'm a detour on a ride
For a phone call and a soda, I'm a blur from the driver's side
I'm the last gas for an hour if you're going twenty-five
I am Texaco and tobacco, I am dust you leave behind

I am peaches in September, and corn from a roadside stall
I'm the language of the natives, I'm a cadence and a drawl
I'm the pines behind the graveyard, and the cool beneath their shade,
Where the boys have left their beer cans
I am weeds between the graves.

My porches sag and lean with old black men and children
Their sleep is filled with dreams, I never can fulfill them
I am a town.

I am a church beside the highway where the ditches never drain
I'm a Baptist like my daddy, and Jesus knows my name
I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age;
I am not your destination
I am clinging to my ways
I am a town.

I'm a town in Carolina, I am billboards in the fields
I'm an old truck up on cinder blocks, missing all my wheels
I am Pabst Blue Ribbon, American, and "Southern Serves the South"
I am tucked behind the Jaycees sign, on the rural route
I am a town
I am a town
I am a town
Southbound.

PEACE