Pride, Dread and Hope in Arkansas

Bill Clinton returned to Arkansas last week to say “Hello, I must be going,” but we’re comfortable with contradictions--and not only from him. As an Arkansawyer (the more locally common, countrified term for Arkansan), I and my fellow natives of the Wonder State have followed the heady and head-snapping ride of our former president with our customary mixture of pride and dread. But over the past decade, he hasn’t been the only Razorback to hog the national spotlight and toy with our emotions. Perhaps inspired by the White House heights achieved by one of their own, other Arkansawyers rose to the very top of their fields during Clinton’s presidency. In the areas of sports, business and film, natives of the “small, failed Southern state,” as Clinton’s opponents liked to call it, won championships, profits and even an Oscar. Typically, however, like the Clinton reign, this amazing record of accomplishment was attended by almost operatic self-destruction.

These flaws spring from an obsession with our image that predates the century. From Mark Twain’s portrait of Arkansas natives as gullible rubes in “Huckleberry Finn” to H.L. Mencken’s bilious assess- ment that the state was one of the “great moron reservoirs in the United States,” from the segregation battles of the 1950s and ‘60s to the unflattering portrayals during the Clinton years, the image of the Arkansawyer has continuously taken a beating. As a result, the Arkansawyer works tirelessly to prove his worth, but even with achievement, he seems to question himself. When he ventures out into the world, he brings this baggage with him. We Arkansawyers all come from a place called Hope, but we have a time-share in a place called Doubt.

Even ignoring Clinton, the past decade has been both the Golden Age and “The Gong Show” for Arkansawyers. First of all, in sports, which matter so much to us (and to the nation), Arkansawyers reached unprecedented heights. (And if you think that sports isn’t as significant as politics, keep in mind that last year, 101 million people voted for president but 131 million watched the Super Bowl.)

Before Tiger Woods, the most watchable figure in the world of golf was John Daly, the conflicted shag-haired country boy from Dardanelle, Ark. In true Clintonian emergence out of nowhere, he was the last man to make the field for the 1990 PGA Tour tournament and responded with an improbable streak to the championship. Tabloid-worthy troubles ensued in the form of a rancorous split from his wife and admission of alcoholism, which he at first unsuccessfully tried to self-treat by downing M&Ms; instead of Maker’s Mark. Still, again in Clintonian fashion, he displayed enough resilience to win another major, the 1995 British Open. And the now teetotaling Daly is once again teeing it up on Sundays. But Daly also was a trailblazer. Would the public (and the golf establishment) have embraced an outsider like Tiger Woods had Daly not gripped and ripped open the door by showing them (with both his flameouts and his 300-yard drives) that golf could be played by anybody, even a big ol’ country boy with a 4x4 load of personal baggage?

In pro basketball, famous second-banana Scottie Pippen, from the bleachered gyms of the University of Central Arkansas, put his Arkansas neuroses on display when he pouted on the bench and refused to obey his coach’s order to enter a crucial game after a deciding play was drawn up for another player. Though voted one of the league’s 50 greatest players, he has been criticized as someone who can’t deliver in the clutch and probably never will escape the long shadow of his teammate Michael Jordan, the ultimate clutch player. When and if Pippen ever gets the opportunity to go up for a title-winning shot, will his native Arkansas self-doubt, reinforced by the Jordan legacy, cause a twinge that will lead the shot astray? For his sake and for all Arkansawyers who still live in Hope, I’ll be praying for the shot to go in, but the uncertainty of the moment will be more gripping than any Jordan shot.

To quickly wrap up the Arkansas era in sports: Yes, the University of Arkansas basketball team, with the First ‘Sawyer watching, won the national championship in 1994, but we were beaten the following year by the slick crew from UCLA, of course. We had one year of glory before our doubts and disappointments were realized again.

In business, the past decade has seen an explosion of Arkansas tycoonery. Don Tyson, the country’s poultry king (and tarred and feathered by charges of bribery and other chicken-ery) recently swallowed up a red-meat producer to become America’s largest purveyor of formerly living protein.

But even he is dwarfed by the late Sam Walton, who towered over retailing like a colossus in a ball cap, which he wore even for a cover photo on Fortune magazine. With only Bill Gates as a rival for the soul of American business, Walton’s megalith was built with down-home straightforwardness (and rube-ish ruthlessness, when need be). Behind it all seemed an insatiable desire to prove his worth to the world by conquering it.

Would the comprehensive convenience of both general and specialized superstores, from Home Depot to Circuit City to Barnes & Noble, be as prevalent today without the vision and success of Wal-Mart? And yet in his quest for supremacy, Walton and his Wal-Marts have laid waste, from coast to coast, to the small-town downtowns like the one in Rogers, Ark., from which he sprang. Does self-loathing need a better example than the neutron-bomb efficiency of Wal-Mart, which extols small-town values in a package that destroys small towns?

Finally, in the arts, the Arkansas Era boasts Billy Bob Thornton, who blazed across Hollywood’s firmament (on an Amtrak train, because of his fear of flying) with “Sling Blade” in 1996. His Arkansas fable of a man who was both a half-wit and a mechanical genius, a gentle father figure and a brutal murderer, won him an Oscar, and he became a Hollywood hot property. His success also gave independent filmmaking a shot in the arm and provided a boost for other artists with singular visions. For we Arkansawyers, “Sling Blade” both reinforced and attacked stereotypes, and we were simultaneously proud of and embarrassed by Thornton’s portrait. Thornton himself became an idiosyncratic Hollywood personality, with the press chronicling his marriage to actress Angelina Jolie, his weight loss and his fling with Laura Dern. But to put aside the biography of Thornton: As an example of the “Arkansas man,” Thornton’s “Sling Blade” protagonist is right on target--a tireless and talented worker, a populist in whom people recognize their own humanity and a victim of his self-destructive demons. For the Arkansawyer, these qualities seem bred in the bone.

Or, in the words of the narrator of the novel “The Dog of the South,” by Charles Portis, Arkansas’s best writer: “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t achieve escape velocity.”