There's a new Brer Rabbit movie on the horizon.
They're the kind of down-south, home-grown wisdom the south should be famous for. Of course in one of God's many cruel jokes we instead get Larry the Cable Guy.
My favorite is the story of Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby. For those of you not familiar, here's the basic gist: Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit's nemesis, decides he's going to teach Rabbit a lesson.
So Fox makes a baby out of tar and sets it out on a leg. Rabbit comes along and tries to strike up a conversation with the baby. When the baby doesn't respond, Rabbit teaches it manners.
Then Rabbit hauls back and punches the tar baby as hard as he can. Of course all he accomplishes is getting himself stuck, which makes him angrier. So he hits tar baby again and again getting himself stuck faster with every blow.
Fox comes to eat Rabbit but Rabbit outsmarts him and manages to escape -- I'd tell you how but I'd hate to ruin the ending.
When I first saw the ad for the new movie I was reading news reports about "Operation Swarmer," our largest air assault in Iraq since "Shock and Awe." I had just been thinking about what a quagmire Iraq had become, and it occurred to me that Iraq was more of a tar baby then a quagmire.
Operation Swarmer being our latest futile attempt to extract ourselves from the situation by hitting Iraq harder.
According to Time, this air assault rounded up 48 insurgents, 17 of which had already been released by the time the story went to print. We sent in 1,500 troops and we snagged 31 potential insurgents.
Currently, estimates put the insurgency in the realm of 30,000 insurgents and insurgent sympathizers number in the hundreds of thousands. So some quick math says that it will take us 1,500,000 troops to "fight them over there."
Fighting them over there is exactly the kind of sound bite politics that trap us in these situations. Our political landscape is dotted with issues where politicians get tough on an issue to score political points. The war in Iraq is the most obvious -- but the pattern is pervasive.
The biggest tar baby behind Iraq has to be the war on drugs. "Three-strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentences were meant to win our war on drugs. Think really hard about the last time you saw someone using drugs. Wasn't too long ago was it?
Like the war in Iraq, the war on drugs has cost us billions of dollars and done us almost no good. Yet every election cycle guarantees that at least one candidate will be painted as soft on crime for proposing rehab programs and medical assistance for drug addicts.
Immigration is one issue that I had begun to believe that there was a chance we'd be hearing of some real solution.
The Bush administration recently proposed a plan that attempted to deal with the underlying economic realities of America's relationship with illegal alien workers through a guest worker program.
Sadly, it's come under fire from the GOP and its political future is murky at best. It's looking like we're going to try building a wall and throwing every Mexican who crosses it into jail. This solution is prohibitively expensive while not addressing the actual problem -- but it sells well down south.
So next time you hear political candidate accusing his opponent of being, soft on crime or an apologist for al Qaida, take a step back. Is he Brer Rabbit wailing away on tar baby? Is his opponent really on the side of terrorists and drug dealers or is he looking for a way to get thrown into the briar patch to escape Brer Fox?
Oh man, I promised I wouldn't ruin the ending of the tar baby story. Oh well, go see the Brer Rabbit movie anyway.
