Jeff Whitten
Local Columnist
This part of Georgia has always seemed to me to be a pleasingly ramshackle place where, so long as you at least tried to behave yourself, you could get away with just about anything because it wasn’t too crowded and most folks were laid back and too busy trying to find cold beer on Sundays before the Blue Laws changed to be hassled.
But it’s changing.
On one hand, it’s getting New York Florida-ized all over by developers who wouldn’t know the South Carolina Lowcountry from the Georgia Fall Line if one or the other jumped up and whacked them upside the head.
On another it’s being inundated with entitled northerners who move here to get away from whatever ills plagued their rust bucket of home state only to complain ad nauseum when they get here and then go out and buy up all the toilet paper and bottled water every time a storm gets halfway across the Atlantic.
And then there’s what happened to one of my Richmond Hill buddy’s, who emailed me the other day to tell me about a recent trip to Walmart in which he: Saw a buxom woman breastfeeding her baby in the frozen foods section.
“She was casually shopping and making no attempt to cover her breast,” said my buddy, who compared it in size to a “large grapefruit.”
He also noted that while it was perfectly natural to breast feed a baby, perhaps there is clothing designed to provide some cover and concealment to mothers, if for no other reason than preventing teen boys from getting riled up because “they have enough trouble staying calm to begin with.”
And: An unkempt woman walked past my friend “with a very small dog on a leash,” and he tried to make a joke about it being her guard dog which apparently didn’t go over very well, but then, as the woman passed, he noticed she’d messed her britches — maybe more than once.
It’s a strange world we live in, said my friend, who also dropped a 2-1/2 pound frozen food package on his toe. “Maybe it was my punishment for looking at the boob three or four times,” he said.
Yep, the Lord works in mysterious ways.
And besides, I have long thought this part of Georgia is in trouble, mostly because I don’t like developers, politicians, bankers, lawyers, hipsters, pompous editors or Facebook community page people, and that’s two thirds of the population hereabouts.
But it’s not just us. I think the whole country is going to heck in a handbasket, judging by the advertisers supporting the nightly news.
If the advertising during CBS Evening News is any indication, then collectively we’re a sick, itchy, crazy bunch of good-hearted elitists whose goal in life is to drive a fancy SUV or $90,000 pickup whilst staying properly medicated so our bowels don’t explode and we don’t twitch and make funny faces at other people due to possible side effects from the drugs we take to keep from climbing up on a roof and mooning the neighbors. And even then, if we wear diapers we can go out dancing and have that extra margarita. Oh boy.
What’s more, whilst I am all for better living through chemistry, it worries me that our national health is so bad that various drug companies spend millions to let us know their products are available. Isn’t, one would wonder, what doctors are for?
And that’s nothing compared to the local advertising during Savannah TV news. It consists almost entirely of ambulance chasing lawyers with an occasional cameo from air conditioning repairmen, car salesmen or a convenience store magnate thrown in for good measure.
Apparently, a study of Coastal Empire demographics likely to watch the local news unearthed a target audience in which most of us have at one point or another gotten run over by some 30-year-old teenaged maniac at about the same time our air conditioning gave up the ghost and we wound up at a Parker’s trying to buy a cooler full of chewy ice for 99 cents.
My current favorite ambulance chasers are Farah and Farah, mostly because the two main Farahs remind me of Peter Venkman and Louis Tully – or Bill Murray and Rick Moranis – of Ghostbusters Fame.
My hope is one day I’ll turn on local TV news to see them do a commercial spoofing the Ghostbusters.
In case they do, and with apologies to Ray Parker Jr., I’ve even written the lyrics to a song “Tortbusters” which, I think, they might use in the commercial.
When you get run over In your Range Rover Who you gonna call?
Tortbusters!
When you slip and fall In the office hall Who you gonna call Tortbusters!
We ain’t afraid of no judge We ain’t afraid of no judge Tortbusters!
If State Farm Fred Says you’re dead Who you gonna call?
Tortbusters!
When you bust your butt In the Pizza Hut, Who you gonna call?
Tortbusters!!
We ain’t afraid of no judge. We ain’t afraid of no judge. Tortbusters!!
Later, folks.
Now retired, Whitten is an occasional columnist for the News.