Bubba expounds

‘A man’s gotta worry’

Reader requests dribbled in that I traipse over to eastern Arkansas to take the temperature of Bubba McCoy about the looming imposition of Obamacare.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

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The irascible charmer lives near the White River. So first I asked what he made of all that federal blueway folderol.

“I actually read what the feds said they would do if it was a blueway,” Bubba said.

“It was less understandable than that column you wrote the other day about race, if that’s possible.

“So to heck with it. If you can’t say it straight, you can’t do it straight.”

This was at the car lot, which Bubba has reopened, owing to his sense of a modest economic recovery. He’s got about two dozen late-model pickups and SUVs that were purchased at auction in eastern Tennessee.

He is banking that the farm boys and the good ol’ boys are ready for new wheels.

He’s willing to tote a few notes in the short term.

He even picked up a late-model Dodge made to look like a muscle car but possessed of a little ol’ six-cylinder engine.

“It looks like your big brother’s car, but drives like your little sister’s,” Bubba said, adding that the only thing that ever really matters to anybody anyway is how something looks.

“Life is one part smoke mixed with one part mirror,” he said.

He said that went for cars, politics, preaching and writing for the newspaper.

He never sold the car lot itself, but merely leased space on it during its dormancy to a tamale stand and fried catfish stand, both of which still operate there.

“Synergy?” I asked.

“Whut?” he replied.

He said he just likes having food nearby.

As for Obamacare, Bubba said, “It ain’t got nothin’ to do with me, thank you very much.”

It has nothing to do with him, he figures, because he’s been on Medicare three years now and tapping his ample personal health savings account to pay the premiums on his and Mrs. Bubba’s Blue Cross supplemental policies.

That includes a drug plan for his blood pressure medicine, his cholesterol controllers and her antidepressants, a few of which she sneaked into his pile of meds every morning for about a month.

That’s until he figured it out and blew a gasket-which he’d have blown a lot higher if he hadn’t been on the pills-and during which Bubba was uncommonly easy to live with.

He said he recalled sitting around during that period of bliss trying to remember what he needed to be worrying about, but not being able to think of it.

“A man’s gotta worry,” he said.

“If you ain’t worryin’ about what’s gonna happen in this life, then you’re gonna get hit with it from the blind side. Worry is what makes a man successful.

“If I hadn’t been worrying about the economy, I wouldn’t have unloaded those cars when I did, and I’d have been up … “

He invoked a notorious creek with an excremental name.

Bubba said chilling out is fine, but only for limited stretches on Wild Turkey.

Back on Obamacare, he said he was beginning to entertain serious doubts on whether it would actually happen except maybe in New York and Connecticut and a few other liberal places that will try to make it work.

“First of all, most states down in this part of the world, except us, aren’t gonna do that Medicaid expansion,” he said. “And already Obama has delayed the penalty for businesses. All they’re doing on this thing is backing up.

“If you’re going up a hill, you can’t stop or slow down. Your president is rolling back down as we speak.

“And now I’m wondering if the Democrats aren’t gonna lose the Senate, in which case Republicans will have enough votes to keep it gummed up.

“And I’ll tell you another thing: If the Democrats are counting on Mark Pryor to keep the Senate, then they can forget it. He’s gone. History. I don’t care if it’s Tom Cotton or Tom Soybeans or Tom Winter Corn. It’s over.”

So I asked Bubba if he was predicting a complete Republican sweep.

“Not quite. Mike Ross is gonna win for governor. I’m gonna vote for him.”

I asked him why.

“I can’t rightly tell you,” he said.

“Maybe it’s because I’ve met Asa and Halter.”

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 80 on 07/28/2013

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