After MAGAWeek2023 and my extended time out of town, I’ve decided to take this week to rerun some classic hits from the extensive TPP back catalog. Most of the posts are those with very high view counts, though I am presenting them in no particular order. TBT will proceed as usual, and regular posts will resume Saturday, 15 July 2023.
With that, here is 7 September 2021’s “Driving the Georgia Backroads“:
As noted in Saturday’s post, I spent the weekend in the woods. Specifically, my girlfriend, her friend, her friend’s husband, and I went camping at Watson Mill Bridge State Park outside of Comer, Georgia.
It was a rejuvenating experience. Last week was borderline hellacious, and by the end of it I was pretty much done with everything (’tis the season; thank goodness for Thanksgiving!). Spending two nights in the forest really cleansed my mind and soul. My body got a good workout on some vigorous woodland trails, though I also polluted it with plenty of s’mores and campfire hot dogs.
We stayed at one of the park’s three “pioneer” campsites, designed for primitive camping—camping without water or electricity (although I discovered a water spigot about one hundred feet from our camp, which I used to keep the dogs hydrated). Everything we cooked was over a fire, and the other couple was kitted out with all the necessities. The wife (you’ll see her in a picture below of me cooking over the fire) has been camping for years, and it is apparently one of her favorite activities, so she had all the gear necessary to cook and live outdoors (at least for a weekend).
Even at the primitive camp, and with a more experienced couple to help out, it was “easy mode” camping: we pulled our cars right up to the campsite, and it was a short walk to restrooms and showers in the main part of the camp. Still, I ended up going without a shower until we got out of the woods Sunday, but surprisingly did not smell like Bigfoot (even if I looked like him a bit).
Regardless, we definitely “roughed it,” as they say. We slept in very cold weather in our tents and sleeping bags (my sleeping bag was very warm), and even with some padding from an air mattress and yoga mats, I could definitely tell I was on the ground. The cold weather was glorious, though—there’s something invigorating about temperatures below fifty degrees Fahrenheit that gets the blood flowing. I woke up before everyone else Sunday morning and managed to get quite a bit of grading done at a picnic table, but not before taking a short walk around the park, during which I saw a white-tail deer prancing in the foliage (during the night, we heard coyotes in the distance; I was thankful not to see any of those).
As I noted in various updates about delayed posts, I was back in Athens, Georgia this weekend. On the way over Friday, my GPS routed me a different way than usual, apparently due to a massive wreck on I-20.
The rerouting took me off I-20 at Lexington, South Carolina, taking me through painfully slow traffic in the bustling county seat before spitting me out on US-378 West, which wended its way towards the Upstate.
I then hit US-178 West towards Greenwood and Abbeville, transferring to various State roads. I eventually ended up on SC-72, heading through Calhoun Falls at the South Carolina-Georgia border.
At that point, SC-72 became GA-72, which took me through Elberton and Comer, Georgia, before depositing me in Athens.
As many of my readers are not from South Carolina—or even from this country!—let me translate that for you: I went through a lot of small towns in very rural parts of South Carolina and Georgia.
Murphy and I spent this Labor Day Weekend visiting my girlfriend and her German Shepherd in Athens, Georgia, which is about three-and-a-half hours from Lamar. As such, I spent a solid seven or so hours on the road this weekend, not counting time we spent tooling around Athens.
For a three-day weekend, that’s not much driving, and I’ve driven longer distances. Way back in the mists of graduate school, circa 2006 or 2007, I drove from Knoxville, Tennessee to Rock Hill, South Carolina (not far), then from Rock Hill to Richmond, Virginia and back just to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra with a friend. She took the wheel only for the last hour of the drive back, and apparently as soon as I got into the passenger seat, I was out cold.
Granted, I was twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. In the intervening fifteen years, my zest for driving all night to hear live symphonic holiday power metal has waned considerably. Now I’m lucky if I can make it to 10:30 PM without falling asleep on the couch, my multiple after-school drives to Universal Studios notwithstanding.
But I digress. While I may lack the stamina of my reckless youth, I do alternatively loathe and appreciate a long drive.
The results are coming in from the two Georgia Senate run-offs, and it looks like the Democrats (at the time of writing) have secured one US Senate seat, and are poised—thanks to some last-minute ballot-printing, no doubt—to win a second. Raphael Warnock, the black minister who hates the military, defeated Kelly Loeffler. Jon Ossoff, a progressive’s progressive (he attended Atlanta’s incredibly Leftist Paideia School), holds a razor-thin lead over David Perdue. I’m sure Stacey Abrams will manufacture the necessary votes.
Of course, the Democratic victories—which will give the Democrats narrow control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency come Biden the Usurper’s inauguration later this month—rest squarely at Georgia Republicans’ feet. Governor Kemp’s unwillingness to uphold the integrity of the presidential election demoralized conservative voters—why vote if the system is rigged, and your own party won’t fight to fix it?
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With the election still in the balance—it may be decided by the time you read this post—and two formerly conservative Southern States up for grabs, I thought it would be timely to revisit this piece, “The Invasion and Alienation of the South,” which looks at Leslie Alexander’s post “Stranger in a Strange Land.” In that piece, Alexander writes about the hollow, joyless cosmopolitanism of living in Dallas—a stark contrast to the tight-knit cordiality and tradition of her native Louisiana.
While watching the election returns, it occurred to me that Georgia and North Carolina should not be risky toss-ups, and Virginia never should have been lost to hordes of Swamp People. It’s an irony of history that Washington, D.C., was placed next to Virginia so the ornery planters, suspicious of federal power, could keep a closer eye on the national government. Now, that bloated national government dominates politics in Virginia through its largess.
Meanwhile, transplants from up North have infested previously conservative States. Charlotte, North Carolina has become a wretched hive of globalist scum and villainy. During my online dating days, I would routinely get matched with babes from Charlotte; invariably, they were always from Ohio, or New York, or California—never actually true North Carolinians.
It’s one thing when local blacks vote Democratic. Fine—we’re at least part of the same(-ish) Southern culture, and we’ll help each other out. But then gentry white liberals start coming down here, ruining our politics and our cities.
Now, we live in a world in which Joe Biden might win Georgia, and North Carolina—NORTH CAROLINA—has become a nail-biter every four years.
Such is the price of our addiction to economic growth and convenience. What we’ve gained in luxuries we have lost in heart. We have paid for them with our souls.
Here is November 2019’s “The Invasion and Alienation of the South“:
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