It's Bubba time

Editor's note: This column originally ran online only on Wednesday.

Like the rest of us, Bubba McCoy is deeply misunderstood.

People kept asking, "What does Bubba McCoy think about the election?" They kept saying, "I know he must be happy. This was the revenge of angry white men without college educations. It's Bubba time."

Go talk to him, they urged.

I knew better. I've come to understand over these 30 years that Bubba is a fountain of common sense, of independent rural wisdom, of nuance, even. I've come to resent the ever-easy caricature--of him, of me, of anybody.

Except Donald Trump.

Dubious, I drove east to Bubba's Auto Emporium.


I found the old boy in the trailer office, drinking coffee. He didn't look as robust as before. He said he'd had two stents installed after Mrs. Bubba and his daughter, Yvonne, the dentist's wife over in Memphis, intervened to say they were worried that he was out of breath all the time.

He hadn't felt like going to deer camp, where all he'd done for years was cook and sip whiskey and play cards.

I told him I was glad he got diagnosed and fixed. And he said, "Yeah, now I've got a better chance to live until I get Old-Timers', unless I've got it already."

I decided neither to correct his mispronunciation of Alzheimer's nor confront his fatalism.

I decided instead to lead the witness, to tell Bubba that people were calling him the quintessential Trump voter but that I thought otherwise. I told him I saw the quintessential Trump voter instead as the smart-mouth kid coming in to buy a pickup from Bubba that he couldn't afford.

"I didn't vote," he said. "I wasn't feeling too spry and neither one of 'em was worth me gettin' up and taking the trouble. Trump is a con man and Hillary would rather climb a tree to tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell you the truth--not that she could climb a tree.

"Anyway, the odds of my making it through another president are pretty slim, unless maybe I can get some of that medical marijuana. I'm happy to leave the future to that kid you're talking about. I'll let him deal some mornin' with a pickup that's disappeared and a president that's bat-**** crazy."

But what of the fate of Bubba's own grandchildren over in Memphis?

"They're lost to their iPhones," he said of the teenagers. "Neither one of 'em has looked up since about 2013."

Bubba is a professional man. He's a tad privileged, too, having married well enough to inherit the farm he lost, but with enough cash to start the car lot. He doesn't depend on the government. He's not some guy in Ohio who has lost his factory job and is convinced Trump will bring it back.

Bubba has spent his life selling cars to the people Trump has now sold a bill of goods.

I told Bubba that I figured his dentist son-in-law, the great teeth-whitener of east Memphis, had voted for Trump. I sensed that the suburban professional man was more dangerous in the voting booth than the rural professional practitioner of common sense.

"Oh, yeah. He was big for Trump. He says Obamacare is about to kill him."

I told Bubba that about the only thing Obamacare did in the dentistry field was extend Medicaid coverage with dental benefits to poor kids, few of whom I expected to have shown up at a dental clinic in the affluent white-flight suburb.

"I don't know about that," Bubba said, "but my best guess is that, if my son-in-law is talkin', there's some BS a-happenin'."

The last time I'd talked to Bubba, he'd said he'd base his vote on which of the candidates seemed the sickest. His idea was to improve the nation's chances of getting to the running mate, Michael Pence or Tim Kaine. So what about that?

"I made the mistake of watching the vice presidents' debate," he said. "Kaine turned out to be crazy and Pence reminded me too much of the Baptist preacher the missus drags me to listen to every Sunday."

I asked Bubba what he thought would become of our great country.

"Oh, hell, I don't know," he said. "But I'll tell you what I do know: That flimsy little Jeep Patriot you're driving ... it looks late-model and low-mileage to me. There's a mom and a dad who would buy that thing in a heartbeat for their high school daughter. Let me take it off your hands and put you in something a little more manly, something with an engine you can see without a magnifying glass. A Cherokee, maybe. Let's walk out there and look around."

I told Bubba the heart repair hadn't slowed his sales instinct.

"We do what we do," he said. "You write. I sell cars."

I didn't buy the Cherokee. I'm leaning toward the 4Runner.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 11/27/2016

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