Count me among the gaggle that is looking forward to the new Harper Lee like a 5-year old anticipating Christmas morning. Release date is this coming Tuesday. I will be at the nearest bookstore at opening time to grab my copy.

PBS recently broadcast a new American Masters episode about Harper Lee as part of the run-up to the new book. It’s well worth the time, especially the interviews with the adult Mary Badham (Scout in the movie) and with Lee’s elder sister, Alice, an embodiment of what Southerners call a real character. But the best to me was the interweaving of guests reading favorite passages that faded across to the movie where the dialogue was straight from the page. read more

That’s Lt. Derrick Gamble of the South Carolina Highway Patrol Honor Guard carrying the Confederate Battle Flag that, as of Friday morning, no longer flies above the SC statehouse. There’s something pretty damned delicious in seeing a black man carry that rag away once and for all.

The crowd chants of “USA! USA!” as the flag was coming down struck me as just right. The United States won that damned war, and if it took yet another Confederacy surrender to drive that point home, so be it. ¹That it happened in what Pierce calls the “the home office of American sedition” just adds to its sweet piquancy. A pal suggested that an artillery bombardment from Fort Sumter would have made for a fitting coda, but I imagine the liability insurance would have been too dear. And apparently my idea of just taking a chainsaw to the pole with the flag still aloft lacked the dignity that the organizers were looking for. read more