Fine Red Dirt

By Donald Morrison

CRACKERS by Roy Blount Jr. Knopf; 291 pages; $10.95

Georgia is a place you get sent to or you come from or you march through or you drive through," writes Roy Blount. "It's got some fine red dirt, hills, vegetables, and folks, but I don't believe anybody has ever dreamed of growing up and moving to Georgia." That includes ex-Atlantan Blount, the sportswriter and humorist whose 1974 About Three Bricks Shy of a Load did for the Pittsburgh Steelers roughly what Sherman did for the South.

Back in 1976, when a fellow Georgian was elected President, the author sensed a sort of redneck renaissance in the making: "The assumption seemed to be, you weren't going to have to do anything except be Southern to reflect the Administration's glory. Persons wearing boots caked with South Georgia slops and pig dung were going to be whooping and rolling and snorting and dancing in the streets of Washington, slaughtering hogs and boiling up big vats of grits out back of the Sans Souci." But as the Carter era wore on, Blount felt betrayed. He would not forgive his fellow Southerner for letting Congress, the Soviets, the Iranians and that killer rabbit make him look foolish. Why, he wonders, couldn't the President be more like his brother, a real, no-nonsense redneck? "The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy," Blount reckons, "a cobbler of Billy's basic blackberries oozing up into and through Jimmy's cut-to-specifications crust . . . forming a nice-and-awful compound like life in Georgia."

So much for the intellectual content. The rest of the book is a cunning, amusing and not always pertinent decoupage of articles centering on Blount's South pole: an amusing essay on the habits of the possum; or the tale of a woman who gets stuck to a dry cleaner's revolving garment rack with Super Glue and spends her days plotting a damage suit with her attorney trotting along beside her as she goes round and round with the cleaning; or Blount's modest proposals for new mass media. One scheme would eliminate the more boring moments of life by "quick cutting" people from, say, home to office by means of roving teams armed with chloroform and stretchers. Another would provide a personalized morning newspaper, summarizing what a reader did the night before:

YOU LOSE YOUR WALLET, $84; AGREE TO WED POLICEWOMAN; BATTERED CLERIC VOWS SUIT

REGRET FORESEEN

SERIES OF VERY BAD MOVES LINKED TO GREEN PILL, TEN DRAMBUIES

For lagniappe, Blount throws in a few dozen original song lyrics, including, "He's in the driver's seat now,/ Beside him sits my wife./ And I'm just a bug on the windshield of life. "Or

She's my Sugarbaby, She's my pride, She's all Polly Esther And a yard wide.

I doubt she 'II ever wrinkle bad, She's got a kind of shine, She's all Polly Esther And two-thirds mine.

If Crackers reveals an overarching thesis, it is that contemporary America, like its President, is too emotionally constrained, too given to artifice, too Northern. "Hey: we are in a time when the most sweeping program is Laverne and Shirley," complains Blount. "When you can buy artificial gravy entailing 'beef-style' granules. When 'comparison shopping' is not considered redundant . . . when the dollar is funnier than the zloty, and when Fudgsicles and tomatoes taste about the same." A familiar granule-style beef, but seldom so wittily or exuberantly expressed. It hardly matters that other writers have spoken cantankerously with spoonbread accents and loony inspirations. After all, as Georgians like to inquire, why not the best? --By Donald Morrison

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