Red-Neckery

As if I didn't need more reasons to get out of Georgia, in addition to its fondness for capital punishment, the worst traffic in the nation, and residents prone to mowing swastikas in their front yard, a tavern in nearby Marietta is now selling t-shirts depicting Curious George peeling a banana, with the words "Obama '08" underneath.

As mortifying as this might be, the Marietta local newspaper, a far-right rag that frequently runs Ann Coulter columns on its op-ed page on its more moderate days, ran a picture of the t-shirts on its front page as part of its "coverage" of the ensuing controversy. Some of my co-workers found it funny and insisted on showing it to me, saying "We were going to go there for lunch today, but figured the liberals out picketing might have already torched the place by now." Fun-ny.

According to the newspaper, customers of the tavern consider the place a refuge from, in their words, "an otherwise hypersensitive world." Smoking apparently isn't only allowed at the bar, it's expected. "This place is a diamond in the rough," said an patron from ironically-named Woodstock, Georgia. "People here are genuine and honest. It's the one place I can go without having to worry if I'm offending someone."

Even before this latest controversy, the bar was famous for running ultra-right mottoes on a sign out front, slogans like "Obama and Clinton: A boob with nuts and a nut with boobs." Who could take offense at that?

The owner says he's just providing a public service, reminding people they have a right to offend. "This is my marketing tool," he said. And apparently it works, as the more dim-witted among my colleagues wanted to go there for lunch today.

Marietta is in Cobb County, a Republican bastion with a long history of red-neckery. In the 90s, the county passed a resolution condemning the "gay lifestyle," and subsequently was barred from hosting any Olympic events. The Cobb town of Kennesaw had its 15 minutes of fame for protesting gun-control laws by passing legislation that required every homeowner in the town to own a gun. Ironically-named Woodstock (which is actually in adjacent Cherokee County, which makes Cobb look downright progressive at times) counts among its residents a swastika-mowing fugitive and at least one regular patron of the Obama/Curious George tavern. And the saddest part, from my perspective, is that my office is out there in Cobb County, sandwiched between Marietta and Kennesaw.

My 20-mile daily commute (each way!) is against the flow of traffic, now officially the worst in the country, but according to a recent national survey, Atlanta drivers are the sixth-least courteous in the U.S. For those keeping score at home, Miami was the worst, followed by Boston, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Atlanta jumped six spots from last year in the 25-city survey, in which about 100 drivers in each of the cities were surveyed by phone. In the survey, 11 percent of Atlanta drivers said they drive too closely to the car in front of them, the highest percentage of all drivers surveyed. Also, Atlanta drivers ranked first among all cities in driving faster than they should every day, talking every day on the cellphone while driving, and making obscene gestures at other drivers within the last month. All this in the worst gridlock and with the longest commuting times in the nation.

By contrast, the survey found that Portland's drivers are the nation's second-most courteous group on the road, ranking only behind drivers in Pittsburgh and ahead of third-ranked Seattle. I asked one of my colleagues, a former Pittsburgh native (and sadly, one of the potential Marietta tavern customers) why Pittsburgh drivers were so courteous, and he suggested that it was because the city has one of the most elderly populations in the nation, and that it lacked Atlanta's big 16-lane freeways. "Basically, you've got a lot of old people on crappy roads," he surmised.

My house should officially be on the market by this weekend, with a "For Sale" sign out front and everything. It's time for me to go.