Richard (Kinky) Friedman on the Dixie Chicks

Richard (Kinky) Friedman describes himself as "the bastard son of two races - a Jew in America's most redneck state."

After Peace Corps service in Borneo in the mid-60s, Kinky Friedman emerged in the Texas music scene in Austin by the late 60s with his group - The Texas Jewboys - and their signature song: They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore. Friedman is the author of more than a dozen acclaimed mystery novels. He is the (self-proclaimed?) Mayor of Hunt, Texas (pop. fewer than 100). And he is the humor columnist for Texas Monthly. He is my favorite Texas character. You go, Kinky!

[x Texas Monthly]
July 2003
Whistlin' Dixie

Does anyone care what the Dixie Chicks say? Do they even exist? Are they God? Only Dr. Kevorkian knows for sure.

by Kinky Friedman

I WAS HAVING A CUP of coffee one morning in the hostility suite of the mental hospital when my editor called and suggested I write a column on the Dixie Chicks. I told him that by the time this issue came out, people would be asking, "The Dixie who?" "No," he said. "They'll be a topic of heated debate for some time. Just ask your fellow residents."

So I did. I asked a 275-pound, six-foot-tall black man who was under the impression that he was Napoleon. "Sure," he said. "I loved the Dixie Chicks. They were cute and little and purple. They wiggled through a fence in Houston fifty years ago and were eaten by two dachshunds."

"No," I told him. "Those were the Easter chicks."

So I took the elevator up to my padded room in the van Gogh wing, where I live with my pet typewriter. But I wasn't sure what to type. I didn't know a hell of a lot about the Dixie Chicks, but I did know their agent, Dr. Kevorkian. I called him on a secure line.

"Hey, Doc," I said, "how are things goin' with the Chicks?"

"Great!" he said. "Not only are they riding high on the charts here in the States, but they're also moving into heavy rotation on the new country station in Tikrit."

"That's wonderful!" I said. "How's the tour going?"

"Fantastic!" he said. "We're selling out every date. And this summer we've been invited to open for Jerry Lewis on a tour of France."

"How do you explain the rather odd phenomenon," I asked, "of the Chicks going up on the pop charts at the same time they were going down on the country charts?"

"What," he asked, "do those country hicks know about music?"

By the time I hung up with the good doctor, I had an even more confused image of who the Chicks were. Was it healthy for me to be listening to their music? Were they trying to poison my values? Were they trying to poison my soup? I had to know the answer to that last one right away, because the sign in the lobby read "Today is Tuesday. The next meal is lunch."

At lunch I talked to a woman who was sitting at my table, and I asked her what she thought of the Chicks. "I'm going to an ophthalmologists' convention in Las Vegas," she said.

I asked, "Do you think they really should've told a European audience that they were ashamed President Bush came from Texas?"

The woman, in a far deeper, far more bitter voice, answered, "Mother Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking place."

"One more question, if you don't mind," I said. "Do you think the issue of freedom of speech comes into play here? I mean, surely the Dixie Chicks can say what they like onstage or off, but should they be held accountable for their behavior? Or, conversely, do you think bad behavior should be rewarded by a measurable increase of success in the marketplace?"

"I've eaten an appropriate amount for my figure!" the woman screamed in a frightening falsetto. She was becoming increasingly agitated. As an orderly took her away, I wondered whether she hated the Dixie Chicks or just didn't want Jell-O for dessert.

I went back to my room after lunch in something of a petulant snit myself. I was starting to get a rather negative impression of the Chicks. No one in the hospital seemed to have heard of them. Was it possible that they didn't really exist at all? Could it be they were merely a figment of the American imagination? An abstract notion to which we all subscribed? A supreme being in whom we all believed? Were the Dixie Chicks God? "Blasphemous!" I thought. "Impossible!" Yet nobody seemed to know who or what they really were or stood for. And, I was forced to admit, they had pretty much risen from the dead. I bowed my head to pray.

When I looked up, the room was bathed in a strange incandescent, celestial light. Either I was in heaven or inside an old-fashioned jukebox. The Dixie Chicks were on my television set, singing to me in perfect harmony. The lyrics, as best as I can remember, went something like this: "We're sorry if we hurt the president's feelers,/But he wasn't nice like that Garrison Keillors./We're not ashamed that we said what we meant./Now tell us why you're a wig-city resident."

"That's what I want to know," I said. "The shrink claimed he put me in here because I believe I'm George Bush's rabbi. But I am George Bush's rabbi! I told that shrink, 'For God's sake, Hoss! You can't put George Bush's rabbi in a mental hospital! I'm ashamed that you come from New Jersey.'"

"We know how you feel," said the Dixie Chicks, who were now no longer on my television screen but standing in the padded room with me. "We've gone through something like that ourselves. You didn't do anything wrong. You were just misunderstood."

"Damn right!" I said. "I don't belong in here."

"Of course you don't," said the Dixie Chicks. "After all, you're George Bush's rabbi, and he needs all the guidance he can get. Now, before we leave for our sold-out national tour, how'd you like it if we sang for you again?"

"Make it brief," I said. "The pope's calling at two o'clock."

And then they sang, and their voices were so beautiful and innocent that I could imagine what they must have been like when they were just three little girls growing up in the country, never dreaming that one day they'd be pestering the president and posing nude on the cover of a magazine. But I'll always remember the verse they sang to me. I think it's from some old gospel song: "Lord, we have sinned./But who among us/Ever really dances/With the one who brung us?"

Copyright 2003 Texas Monthly

Norman Borlaug Is Not An Aggie Joke, A Presidential Library At College Station Is Something Else

Dr. Borlaug is the greatest Aggie of them all, no joke. However, the A&M crowd toadies up to George I. If there is a library to establish at Texas A&M, it should be a Norman Borlaug Library. Borlaug has done more for this country in a single year than George H.W. Bush accomplished in 4 years. Yet, Texas A&M will honor George I with the equivalent of a Pharoah's tomb. The Ags will have to outdo the hated UT-Austin's homage to LBJ with that Pharoah's tomb: The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. I have a site for George II's inevitable tribute to himself (and his legacy): Baghdad. By the way, the poor folk of the African continent are starving. What good is a crusade against AIDS when all people in Africa are starving? No one has ever accused George II of having a good sense of priorities. Or, good sense alone.

July 11, 2003
The Next Green Revolution
By NORMAN E. BORLAUG

TEXCOCO, Mexico

The key to economic development in Africa is agriculture. As President Bush concludes his trip to the continent, and Americans ponder ways to help it emerge from decades of poverty and turmoil, we would do well to remember that crucial point. Fortunately, we have the economic and technological means to bring about an agricultural revolution.
Using proven agricultural techniques, Africa could easily double or triple the yields of most of its crops. It has the potential not only to feed itself but even to become a dynamic agricultural exporter within a few decades.
African farmers face three main problems: depleted soil, a scarcity of water and distorted economics caused in large part by primitive transportation systems. None of these problems is beyond our capacity to solve.
Low soil fertility is one of the greatest biological obstacles to increasing food production and improving land productivity. (Because of overfarming and insufficient crop rotation, Africa's soil is actually less rich than it was 30 years ago.) Yet there is a man-made solution to the sub-Saharan soil's lack of nutrients — namely, fertilizer, either chemical or organic. Unfortunately, economic forces keep fertilizer out of many African farmers' hands.
Because of transportation costs, fertilizer costs two to three times more in rural sub-Saharan Africa than it does in rural Asia. As a result, fertilizer consumption in Africa is about 10 percent what it is in Asia. That's a market failure, and it could be remedied by a mix of public and private programs. Aid organizations might buy fertilizer at its point of entry into Africa and distribute it at reduced cost to wholesalers. Alternatively, poor farmers might be given fertilizer vouchers.
Chronic water shortages are another challenge. Nearly half of Africa's farmland suffers from periodic and often catastrophic drought. But here, too, the problem isn't beyond our control. About 4 percent of farmland south of the Sahara is irrigated, compared with 17 percent of farmland worldwide.
Large-scale irrigation projects are prohibitively expensive and can ruin villages and ecosystems. But clever, small-scale technologies — including subterranean pools for capturing rainfall, pumps on river banks, and cisterns under drain spouts — can make parched land bloom.
Because of the dismal state of roads in Africa, farmers there face the highest marketing costs in the world. A study by the World Bank, completed in the late 1990's, found that it cost roughly $50 to ship a metric ton of corn from Iowa to Mombasa, Kenya, more than 8,500 miles away. In contrast, it cost $100 or so to move the same amount of corn from Mombasa inland to Kampala, Uganda — about 550 miles. And not much has changed in recent years.
The challenge is that African produce is conveyed to buyers via a vast network of footpaths, tracks and dirt roads, where the most common mode of transport is walking. American- and European-financed road projects would connect farmers with consumers while improving life in countless other ways.
As agriculture takes off, agricultural-improvement and food-aid programs should dovetail. School lunch programs, for example, can provide a significant stimulus to the expansion of commercial food markets if the produce involved is locally grown.
Biotechnology absolutely should be part of African agricultural reform; African leaders will be making a grievous error if they turn their backs on it. (Zambia's president notoriously barred shipments of food aid from America last year that included genetically modified corn.) Genetic technology can help produce plants with greater tolerance of insects and diseases, improve the nutritional quality of food staples and help farmers to expand the areas they cultivate. Rather than looking to European leaders, who have demonized biotechnology, African leaders ought to work to manage and regulate this technology for the benefit of their farmers and citizens.
Africa's warm temperatures, abundant sunlight and wide open spaces and diverse climates make it a place where agriculture can thrive. Countries with tropical climates, like Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone, should be exporting, not importing, rice. Drier places — including Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad — have the potential to be major producers of sorghum and millet. But you can't eat potential.
Nothing will happen without an infusion of money and technical help from the industrialized world. President Bush is right to emphasize a new emphasis on standards of evaluation. Sub-Saharan countries that make significant progress in producing food and diminishing poverty should be rewarded with additional financial support.
Lest we forget, helping African agriculture to prosper is not merely a humanitarian issue — it's a matter of enlightened self-interest. Smallholder African farmers, after all, are stewards of one of the earth's major land masses. And as the Kenyan paleontologist Richard Leakey once said, "You have to have at least one square meal a day to be a conservationist." Aiding African farmers will not only save lives, it will also, in a uniquely literal sense, help to save the earth.
Norman E. Borlaug, professor of international agriculture at Texas A&M University, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Adam and Eve Were Mongrels?

Steve Martin got it right in The Jerk when he proclaimed at the beginning of the film: "I was born a poor, black child." The Religious Right is in trouble: acceptance of DNA (but not evolutionary theory) will render race differences moot. I have yet to hear a Religious Rightist deny the truth of genetic science - borne out by the fear and loathing of cloning. So, if DNA proves race meaningless, where does that leave a poor Religious Rightist?

July 11, 2003
Is Race Real?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOFF

OXFORD, England

I had my DNA examined by a prominent genetic specialist here, and what do you know! It turns out I'm African-American.

The mitochondria in my cells show that I'm descended from a matriarch who lived in Africa, possibly in present-day Ethiopia or Kenya.

O.K., this was 70,000 years ago, and she seems to be a common ancestor of all Asians as well as all Caucasians. Still, these kinds of DNA analyses illuminate the raging scientific debate about whether there is anything real to the notion of race.
"There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all," said Bryan Sykes, the Oxford geneticist and author of The Seven Daughters of Eve. "I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. . . . We're very closely related."

Likewise, The New England Journal of Medicine once editorialized bluntly that "race is biologically meaningless."

Take me. Dr. Sykes looked at a sequence of my mitochondrial DNA to place me on a kind of global family tree. It would have been nice to learn that my ancestors hailed from a village on Loch Ness, but ancestry can almost never be pegged that precisely, and I appear to be a mongrel. One of my variants, for example, is scattered among people in Finland, Poland, Armenia, the Netherlands, Scotland, Israel, Germany and Norway.

On the other hand, is race really "biologically meaningless"? Bigotry has been so destructive that it's tempting to dismiss race and ethnicity as artificial, but there are genuine differences among population groups.

Jews are more likely to carry mutations for Tay-Sachs, Africans for sickle cell anemia. It's hard to argue that ethnicity is an empty concept when one gene mutation for an iron storage disease, hemochromatosis, affects fewer than 1 percent of Armenians but 8 percent of Norwegians.

"There is great value in racial/ ethnic self-categorizations" for medicine, protested an article last year by a Stanford geneticist, Neil Risch, in Genome Biology. It warned against "ignoring our differences, even if with the best of intentions."

DNA does tend to differ, very slightly, with race. Profilers thought a recent serial killer in Louisiana was white until a DNA sample indicated he was probably black. (A black man has been arrested in the case.) As genetic science advances, the police may eventually be able to recover semen and put out an A.P.B. for a tall white rapist with red curly hair, blue eyes and perhaps a Scottish surname.

On the other hand, genetic markers associated with Africans can turn up in people who look entirely white. Indians and Pakistanis may have dark skin, but genetic markers show that they are Caucasians.

Another complication is that African-Americans are, on average, about 17 percent white: they have mitochondria (maternally inherited) that are African, but they often have European Y chromosomes. In other words, white men raped or seduced their maternal ancestors.

Among Jews, there are common genetic markers, including some found in about half the Jewish men named Cohen. But this isn't exactly a Jewish gene: the same marker is also found in Arabs.

"Genetics research is now about to end our long misadventure with the idea of race," Steve Olson writes in his new book, Mapping Human History."
When I lived in Japan in the 1990's, my son Gregory had a play date with a classmate I hadn't met. I asked Gregory, then 5, whether the boy's mother was Japanese.

"I don't know," Gregory replied.

"Well," I asked sharply, "did she look Japanese or American?" Although he'd lived in Tokyo for years, Gregory replied blankly, "What does a Japanese person look like?"
He was ahead of his time. Genetics increasingly shows that racial and ethnic distinctions are real — but often fuzzy and greatly exaggerated. Genetics will increasingly show that most humans are mongrels, and it will make a mockery of racism.

"There are meaningful distinctions among groups that may have implications for disease susceptibility," said Harry Ostrer, a genetics expert at the New York University School of Medicine. "The right-wing version of this is The Bell Curve, and that's pseudoscience — that's not real. But there can be a middle ground between left-wing political correctness and right-wing meanness."
I'll be searching for that middle ground this year as I'm celebrating Kwanzaa.

* * *

Genetic Bazaar

Anyone can get a DNA analysis to try to shed light on genetic origins, but for now don't expect to be pegged too precisely. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University founded a company that offers analyses based on the rubric in his book "The Seven Daughters of Eve," and more information is available at www.Oxfordancestors.com . That's the company I used. An alternative is an American company offering DNA analyses with a genealogy focus, www.familytreedna.com .

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

The Christian Right & Poverty

The Christian Right is frightening. Next, they will demand that the schools teach that the Earth is the center of the Solar System and the Earth is flat. If Jesus Christ were alive today, he would cry out in righteous anger against today's exploitation of the working poor. He would call the Religious Right what they are: hypocrites. Soon the Christian Right will be calling for the Nuremburg Laws. There is a growing White Power movement in the U.S. There is a growing tide of intolerance. And we have a president who wears a military uniform and tells the Big Lie. I am afraid.

[CHE]
Friday, August 11, 2003
Book Choice for Summer Reading Program Again Stirs Controversy in North Carolina
By ELIZABETH CRAWFORD

Upset by what they called "pure liberal propaganda" that is both "sacrilegious" and "Christian bigotry," several Republican state legislators and incoming students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held a news conference on Wednesday at which they criticized the book chosen for the university's summer reading program.

The book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich, was selected this spring with the idea that it "would be a relatively tame selection," said Dean L. Bresciani, the university's interim vice chancellor. Freshmen and transfer students are expected to read the book over the summer and be prepared to discuss it when they arrive on the campus.

In Nickel and Dimed, a nonfiction, national best seller, Ms. Ehrenreich, a columnist for The Progressive magazine, chronicles her experiences as a minimum-wage worker in three American cities. She finds that even holding two jobs simultaneously is not enough to support herself, and in one city, she is unable to find any affordable housing, spending weeks in a motel.


Critics said last year's choice, Approaching the Qur'án: The Early Revelations, by Michael A. Sells, was so sympathetic to Islam that impressionable young students might be persuaded to convert (The Chronicle, September 6, 2002).

"I don't think we were looking for controversial topics," said Mr. Bresciani, who was surprised by the reaction Ms. Ehrenreich's book provoked. "We were looking for a topic that would provide a basis for discussion."

But for the state lawmakers, the book is not an appropriate means to start a conversation with students. Rather, the book choices this year and last are part of a larger "pattern there about being anti-Christian," said State Sen. Austin M. Allran, a Republican.

"I am offended because I am a Christian and she [Ms. Ehrenreich] is an atheist," said Mr. Allran, who has not read the entire book but disagrees with what he has read. "I don't like the disparaging remarks made about Jesus. If I was there, I would sue the school for religious discrimination, and, in fact, I think someone needs to."

That happened last year, when three freshmen sued the university over its choice of the book by Mr. Sells. The federal lawsuit was filed on the students' behalf by the Family Policy Network, a Christian group based in Virginia. Courts later rejected the argument that the reading requirement violated the U.S. Constitution.

While Mr. Allran and the other legislators are not threatening to cut the university's state funds over the book selections, they do want changes. For example, Mr. Allran said the university should be less arrogant and should stop teaching "mass culture." Instead, he said, the summer-reading selections should come from the classics.

Mr. Bresciani, however, explained that the university doesn't assign classics for the summer reading program because students are expected to read those on their own. The program is not meant to teach the content of the books, he said, but to give students a forum for talking about contemporary issues.

"I think there is a misconception that the goal of the program is the book," Mr. Bresciani said. "But it's the critical evaluation that comes out of the discussion sessions that is the goal of the program."

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education