Remember Billy Beer? That is just one of the things that made the brief Carter administration so hilarious. In the late 1970s, Roy Blount Jr. seized on the unlikely election of a Georgia peanut farmer and non-nuclear scientist to explain his home state and the South to a puzzled North (the blurry cover copy above is: “America’s most hilarious writer takes on the whole many angled thing of politics, culture and life”) . It is an entertaining read, with plenty of appearances by Billy and assorted Carter relations, and some moments of wisdom:
The trouble with the world today is that nobody has a handle on it. Hardly anybody. And just because I come from a part of the country whose idea of progressive legislation for many years was an occasional law against “flogging while masked” doesn’t mean that I have no license to lay such a generalized charge.
Let me put it this way: Every single case of anything with which I have ever had the least real iota of experience, personally, has turned out to be either a lot more complicated or a lot less complicated than it had been (and would continue to be) made out to be.
I fault the media, even though I am in on it. …
[Originally posted on my discontinued This Old Book Tumblr.]