The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

2 January 2005

We also like pork rinds

The Los Angeles Times looks ahead to the Orange Bowl, and explains how it is that football is such a passion in this state:

The devotion reaches 75 years back to the Dust Bowl, dark winds that ravaged much of the state, desperate images etched into the popular conscience by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Not long after that historic drought ended, the rains coming in 1939, Bud Wilkinson arrived as coach of the Sooners. Over the next two decades, his teams won three national championships and, during one stretch, went undefeated for nearly four seasons.

If you read that with a straight face, you'd almost think that Bud had been hiding out in Minnesota, where he'd played college ball, and waited for the weather to improve before he'd show up in Norman.

But Los Angeles, given its position at the far end of Route 66, still believes itself to be the Promised Land, and God help us poor, benighted sons of Tom Joad. As Chase McInerney grumbles:

According to the L.A. Times, even Oklahoma's gung-ho love for college football has its roots in the destitute hellhole of the Dust Bowl and its era of toothless, gangly, bug-eyed, backwoods, mattress-strapped to-the-top-of-the-jalopy Okies.

How often do you think a newspaper or magazine story about Dallas, Texas, dredges up the Kennedy assassination? How often do articles about modern-day California delve into the 1906 San Francisco earthquake? When will mainstream media be able to mention Oklahoma without a reflex nod to the Dust Bowl?

Actually, there are surprisingly many grassy-knoll references in East Coast coverage of Dallas, and for pretty much the same reason the Times harps on Steinbeck's version of Oklahoma: they don't know anything else about the damn place. It's convenient shorthand, and it fills up column space, and their local audiences, having heard exactly the same stereotypes all their lives, sit back and nod, "Yes, that's true."

Not that we've never been complicit in these stereotypes: longtime OU President George Lynn Cross once quipped to a legislative budget committee that "I would like to build a university of which the football team can be proud," a statement intended to reflect Cross' frustration with the appropriations process, but one which has gone into the record books implying more regard for pigskins than for sheepskins.

Besides, "Boomer Sooner," despite being basically the same song as Yale's "Boola Boola," is a lot more creative.

Posted at 9:48 AM to Soonerland


Its a habit learned in college, that any credibility is derived from connecting your analysis to either:

1) The Bible
2) The Classics or
3) Mythology. (Greek, Roman or for extra cool points.. Anglo/Saxon/Celtic.)

Posted by: bruce at 2:09 PM on 2 January 2005

The next time you see a news story about Australia - be it about trade policy, football, or fluff, watch closely.

They almost always get in a quick b-roll shot of a kangaroo and/or person of aboriginal descent.

Posted by: Dan at 2:36 PM on 2 January 2005

As far as East Coast media not dredging up comparisons of today's California to the San Fran of the 1906 quake, just wait, oh, about 15 months:)

Original reporting is such as lost art.

Posted by: Brad S at 5:41 PM on 2 January 2005