The West Bank & Barbecue

For those of you eagerly awaiting further uproar from this columnist on the unspeakable assaults on Palestinians on the West Bank, the carnage in the camps, the siege of the Holy Church of the Nativity by Sharon's troops, a word of warning: this column contains reflections on barbecue, a subject that arouses even more passion than matters affecting the peoples of what used to be termed the Holy Land, so parental discretion is advised.

Onward.

Greer, SC: On the road again. This time the vehicle of choice is a 1985 Ford Escort station wagon. Nothing much to look at, but Ford put four-cylinder Japanese diesel engines into a few of those Escorts and this is one of them: 50 or 60 miles to the gallon, tight gears and the feel of a sports car.

I head off down the road from Greenville, SC, toward Birmingham, AL, and my cellphone rings. It's a fellow from The New Republic called Frank something or other, who is eager to quiz me about some recent remarks of mine about the Internet being awash with anti-Israeli material. Amid the crackle and hiss of the ether and the roar of the interstate it's hard to hear Frank through the no-hands speaker on my dashboard, but eventually I catch his purpose, and ask him flatly, in more-or-less these words, "Frank, is your purpose to accuse me of disseminating anti-Semitic libels, under the guise of relaying rumors on the Internet?" Frank allows jovially that this is indeed his intent. I tell him that in my opinion the stories about Israeli spies, as categorized in a DEA report discussed on Fox News, by the French site Intelligence Online and various other news sources including the British Jane's, are legitimate topics of comment, as are the stories about anthrax dissemination involving an anti-Arab researcher.

We go back and forth on such issues until the static gets too bad. Later I retrieve a magnanimous message from Frank saying that he is conferring with associates about whether to deal with me in The New Republic. So I assume that at some point Cockburn will be stigmatized yet again as the purveyor of anti-Semitic filth. It's all pretty predictable. The viler the actions of Israel, the more rabid and undiscriminating the assaults of their troops on Palestinians in the camps, the shriller become charges here that almost any discussion of Israel or of the Israel lobby here is by its very nature anti-Semitic. The day there's a photo of an Israeli soldier shooting a child next to the font in that Bethlehem church you'll find a big story in The New York Times about the troubling resurgence of anti-Semitism, with plenty of quotes from Abe Foxman of the ADL.

And on the topic of the Times, have you noticed how that great paper has had a front-page piece rubbishing the Catholic Church as a nest of molesters every day for some time, especially since Sharon invaded Ramallah? The uncharitable could see this as a preemptive strike against papal criticism of Israel's actions, and also to shift attention away from the blood-stained molestations of the adherents of one of the other monotheistic religions.

Birmingham, AL: Friends take me to Dreamland, promoting it as home port for some of Alabama's best barbecue. The pork ribs are succulent, the sauce not excessively piquant, nor too tomato-laden in flavor. I report as much to friends in the Pacific Northwest and receive an e-mailed warning from Dave Vest, member of the region's hottest blues band, the Cannonballs. In earlier decades Dave lived in the South, toured with Tammy Wynette in the early years. Dave warns that Cockburn "will observe a steady decline in the quality of the bbq as he travels west. In Texas they will feed him saddle leather with ketchup on it. The Amoco station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, will probably be his last chance for a decent bag of boiled peanuts."

But where is bbq's equivalent to Clarksdale, MS, around which most of the greatest bluesmen grew up? How come those Dreamland ribs were most definitely superior? Obviously the sauce has a fair amount to do with it, and the Dreamland mix was fairly heavy on the vinegar end of the spectrum. The pulled bbq at Jim 'n Nick's, also in Birmingham, was great too. There are the issues of the pit, the hickory wood, the time. In California you can rate expertise in the slow-cooking department (now bizarrely a fad of cooking columns, though a positive development overall) not by barbecue but by the carnitas, where the best I've had is at Hector's, in Watsonville, where all the Mexicans are from Michoacan.

Further news comes from Vest to the effect that the Clarksdale of bbq was a hole-in-the-wall place over by what's now the medical center in Birmingham. "All the musicians went there after hours. You had to rap on a sliding wooden panel if you were white. A black man took your order, but you never saw him, like a confessor. You wanted to lie down and roll in it when you got it." Travel tips from musicians are always worthwhile. Vest advised that "If you cross the Atchafalaya Swamp on I-10, pull off at Henderson. The big service station there is the one where Jerry Lee Lewis got mad because they were selling pirated cassettes and carried the entire tape display out by the pumps, poured gas on it and lit it. The station manager said, 'Jesus Christ what will I tell the distributor?' Lewis, walking to his bus, said, 'Tell him the killer was here.' I have this from Robbie Parrish. He toured with Carl Perkins, too. Anyway, out behind the execrable Landry's restaurant, there's a shed that used to sell decent catfish po-boys."

This kind of expertise should be built, piece by piece, into America's answer to The Odyssey.

Between Birmingham and Jackson: Ben Sonnenberg calls from New York, sobbing with emotion at the obsequies for the Queen Mother. He starts babbling about this being the sort of thing the British do so well. I tell him that when he was in the Scots Guards my grandfather Jack Arbuthnot used to do guard duty at Balmoral, and when the Queen Mother used to visit as a little girl from Glamis Castle, she'd ride around the drawing room on his shoulders. These days Major Jack would probably be cashiered for child abuse.

I check into a motel outside Meridian, hometown of Jimmy Rodgers, and take a look at e-traffic. The Trilateral Commission is in executive session. The Washington Times runs a silly piece where the reporter pours scorn on those, mostly right-wing populists, who denounce it as "secret-world-government-in-waiting." Without irony, the reporter notes that among those attending are 250 political and business "leaders" from around the world, with the U.S. fielding a strong team including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Greenspan and Paul Volcker.

Absent a few Chinese trillionaires too busy consulting their astrologers to attend, this sounds like World Government to me. The thing the conspiratorialists miss is the disposability problem. In the old days world leaders, captains of industry, bankers, politicians, died of heart attacks or lung cancer not long after getting the gold watch for meritorious service. Or they went to the penitentiary. In less decorous parts of the world the hangman or the firing squad performed the same purgative function as the First World's ribeye, martinis or the Marlboro packet. The elites are living longer, and so the executive sessions of World Government?the Trilateral, Bilderberg, Davos, Sun Valley, Aspen, Dubai, the Bohemian Grove?proliferate. Henry Kissinger pockets his speaker's fee and expenses, and anyone challenging the consensus of these peripatetic world governors gets cut off by the IMF.

I also find an attack on Rudi Bakhtiar by the normally excellent Sam Smith, in his Web newsletter Undernews. "Watching Rudi Bakhtiar on CNN Headline News," Smith sneers, "is like watching a film with the wrong soundtrack. While we are as impressed as she clearly is with her natural beauty and carefully honed sultriness, Bakhtiar lacks only a fundamental understanding of what the hell she is talking about. The ill-placed smirks, flirts, and eyebrow quirks appear at random, sometimes accompanying the most dire reports. It admittedly becomes hypnotic once you notice the schizophrenic contrast between her face and her mouth, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with news."

The dirty brute. Rudi studied Brecht in her days at Yale drama school and is practicing the famous verfremdung, or A-effect, indicating to the audience by cunning artifice her own distancing from the garbage her employers force her to regurgitate. And what's the prissy stuff about "carefully honed sultriness"? What does Smith want, some slut with sweat stains under her arms, a ring in her nostril and patchouli oil dripping down her neck?

Jackson, MS: I've been in some empty downtowns in regional America, but Jackson on a Saturday morning is the deadest I've ever seen. ("As dead as New Haven, CT?" editor Strausbaugh reasonably asks.) Eventually I find local ranchers exhibiting their palominos in the fairgrounds and a vast flea market next door, also barely populated. I buy an old 30-gallon iron cookpot for $120, for my New Year's gumbo parties.

The local museum has an exhibition of Eudora Welty's photos, plus some wonderful paintings from Mississippi artists of the 1930s like John McCrady, Karl Wolfe and William Hollingsworth, who killed himself in 1944 while still in his 30s, shortly after he failed to get into the Army on account of poor eyes.

The Natchez Trace Pkwy.: It runs more or less the length of the old trail that led from Nashville down to the old Natchez settlement started by the French in the 18th century. The "trace" is the trail, which became a path, then essentially what in Ireland is called a boreen, with the usual fords, food stands and so forth. Starting in the 1930s it has been rehabbed by the Department of the Interior, a bit like the Blue Ridge Pkwy. Two-lane, with immaculate verges through woods, for about 150 miles. No trucks. Not nearly enough camp sites, of which the Park Service doubtless lives in dread because poor people might take to living there.

I ended up in Huntsville, TX, end of the line for Karla Faye Tucker and many others. The woman at the Holiday Inn gives me a guide to the town's carceral amenities, starting with the Prison Museum. Here I view Old Sparky, a nice specimen of the carpenter's art put together by a convict, and the final seat of 361 men and women between 1924 and 1964. A helpful note advises that the executioner would throw a switch and put 2000 volts, producing 8-10 amperes, through his victim, thus rendering the condemned person unconscious "almost immediately." After three to four seconds the executioner would ease off the current to 500-1000 volts, maintaining paralysis of the brain and other vital organs but preventing the body from bursting into flames. That explains why at least one execution in the Florida death house a couple of years back was marred by flames enveloping the dead man's head. The old skills have died out.

There's a peremptory note in the Huntsville museum about his last meal from one condemned man, J. Morrow Jr.: "1 small steak (tender, no bone, no fat, cooked rare-medium)." After other items Morrow noted, "This is my last meal, and damn it, I want it served hot on however many plates and bowls it takes from mixing it up together."