Jeff Whitten
Local Columnist
Welcome to a New Year’s Eve edition of the Pembroke Mafia Football League, and, right off, here’s hoping 2026 is your best year yet and much more fun than 2025.
Saying that 2025 was a bit, er, weird, is an understatement. It was full-blown weird, especially the daily dose of national news.
It was the sort of weird that happens when some half-naked person you don’t know shows up at your house wanting to use your indoor plumbing, and you keep having to chase him or her away with a broom handle, but he or she keeps coming back hollering something about loafs and pinching.
Again, and again, and again, until you eventually give up and let him or her use the plumbing, and then it gets stopped up and floods half the house.
That sums up 2025 in a nutshell.
Except that somebody decided they want an airport, and somebody else floats the idea of bringing in a mine – an actual mine, mind you, of the sort that extracts stuff from beneath the ground. In Bryan County. Goodness gracious. What’s next? A steel mill? Data Centers? A Sam’s Club? The Big 10?
One could kill two birds with one rock and put the proposed mine under the airport, of course, but then both might sink into whatever’s left of the aquifer after the developers are through with it, and that might make the Riverkeepers even madder.
Still, I’m thinking from now on all state Economic Developers and politicians and carpetbagging developers pushing for such things as factories and massive subdivisions and warehouses and data centers should be required to put them in their own backyards first, not somebody else’s. That would probably slow their roll a bit.
“Wait, that’s going to make it hard for me to get out of my driveway,” they’d say. “And the noise and light pollution and crime and litter from bored juvenile delinquents will destroy my peace and quiet and sense of well-being, and it’ll probably make my taxes go up to pay for the services it will require. Best to pass on this one. It hits too close to home.”
What we need, of course, is three or four good wars at the same time to get our minds off such nonsense as local news, which seems mostly to consist of mayhem, and I’m thinking we’ll probably get some wars sooner rather than later.
But we don’t want so many wars or very large wars it would necessitate reinstating the draft, because that might require even those great Super Americans immune to military service to put some skin in the game.
So, let’s continue picking on a few kiddie-sized countries here and there to show we mean business. It’ll help prop up the Military Industrial Complex and make our recently renamed War Department – or is it Department of War? – feel good about itself and its tattoos and weird pullups and hair gel and TV makeup room and secret stash of ‘roids in the Pentagon.
I’ll hush. I miss the old Army, though I doubt very much it misses me. I was no John Wayne, and, he, of course, was no Audie Murphy. Not even close. That one played heroes on the silver screen. The other was a hero in real life.
Ah well.
This week’s standings:
Bryan County Commission Chairman Carter Infinger is in first with three misses. Carter’s New Year’s resolution is to maybe “whop somebody upside the head.” I’m kidding. He never said that. Nor did he ever call people fussing at county commission meetings, “mostly a bunch of yankee whiners.” That was me. Carter, perhaps more than any other local politician I’ve ever run across, believes in public discourse. He might not go along with popular opinion, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Heck, if we went by popular opinion Taylor Swift would be running the country, if not the universe, because right now there are probably more Swifties than any other demographic this side of Pluto.
Not that she could do much worse than the bunch currently in charge, I’m afraid. It seems we’ve traded ineptitude for something worse. Our illustrious chairman and CEO and president, B.J. Clark, USN Ret., is tied with the Rev. Lawrence Butler and Bryan County Administrator Ben Taylor are tied for second with four misses apiece.
B.J.’s resolution for 2026 is to find his favorite pair of pants and turn them into housing for homeless squirrels and stray cats. He’s apparently thinking of opening his own restaurant.
The Rev. Butler’s resolution is to make sure none of the PMFL gets thrown into purgatory without just cause. Ben resolves to be a Gamecock fan and to buy himself a trough and use it as frontyard art. Unless it snows, then he’ll use it as a toboggan.
Mike Clark and me are tied for third with five misses. Mike’s resolution is to start thinning out his herd of heifers – er, groupies -- because he’s not getting any younger either.
Mine is to stop all this fake news and be kinder, gentler and more gooder, and to learn when not to talk back to my wife.
District 1 County Commissioner Alex Floyd, esteemed ancient sportswriter Mike Brown, former BCN Assistant Editor Ted O’Neil and District 5 County Commissioner Dr. Gene Wallace, DDM, FDIC, are in fourth place while retired Fire Chief Freddy Howell and former District 1 Commissioner Noah Covington are relegated to that social media morass of self-important outrage and petty evil known as the Richmond Hill Community Facebook Page.
Alex’s resolution is to supplant me as the wittiest columnist in the BCN, which won’t be hard; Mike Brown’s resolution is to find that autographed copy of the Magna Carta he got way back when it was drafted by King John in Runnymede in 1215. Mike’s been keeping the thing tucked away in a sock drawer all these years and thinks now it might finally be worth something; Ted’s resolution is to stay in Michigan as far from Richmond Hill and its proximity to hurricanes and people from Ohio as is humanly possible; Dr. Gene’s resolution for the new year is to yank a few bicuspids and make a necklace out of them along with that collection of shrunken heads he’s been saving up for Kirby Smart.
As for this week’s games, it’s one of those deals where some have already been played, others haven’t, and we’re kind of trying to find our way through to the end. Which, I suspect, we will.
In the meantime, may you have a great 2026 and remember, E Pluribus Unum.
Whitten is an occasional columnist for the News.