Tongue-in-Cheek Ended as Tongue-in-Protrusion

Well, I’ll be dad-burned if the Winnebago didn’t make it back to Ioway. Maude and me unloaded the chicken salad, charged my pacemaker, and defrosted the cow--milk for Jim Murray’s cornflakes.

Yup, them L.A. slickers sure thrashed our team. Only Jim Murray had a larger vision--cultural inferiority, somehow demonstrated by the outcome of a football game.

Why, if such a collection of derogatory cliches had been directed toward a racial minority instead of a geographic region, you could bet the bull there’d be manure in the air. Surprising rhetoric from a chronologically mature writer representing an area of such ethnic diversity. What’s the matter, Mr. Murray, got a farmer in your family, a little straw in your shoes?

Perhaps my mind had become addled by years of corn-kicking, so I asked a number of locals about Mr. Murray’s statements. Several seemed as confused as I by his words. One said, “That’s the way he is sometimes.” Another muttered something about his problem with “Eastern writers.”

A kinder view would include the demands to meet the newspaper’s deadline, not enough time to review something written in a twit. What started as tongue-in-cheek ended as tongue-in-protrusion.

Apple pie tastes no worse today.

JOHN W. LARSON

Stockton