re: Steven Godfrey rips Starkville apart

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Ole Miss can’t lay much claim to in-state athletic dominance, but in terms of appealing college towns, there’s sim-ply no argument now, nor will there ever: Oxford is the all-time, undisputed Bear Bryant Rose Bowl Heisman Four Horseman Omnipotent Champion … of the Universe. Moreover, Starkville has enjoyed an apt reputation as one of the most barren, desolate and overwhelm-ingly morose places to go to college in the entire country. To compare the two is an insult.

Question our football and we’ve got little to combat you with. Call out our pastoral visage and and we’ll promptly break a Tiffany wine flute over your thick, red clay fed ag school asses. The worldwide appeal of Oxford’s culture and breathing mystique is so interwoven into our identity that it’s the only honorable metaphor for the beauty of our women (or in this case, vice versa): We know the entire country shows up to stare at our perky, immaculately developed chest. We can’t help it, so we revel in it, fleece tourism dollars because of it, and break a thousand hearts who don’t call 38655 home on a routine basis. Such is a life of breathtaking beauty.

But are you State people really this daft? Cobble together whatever kind of socialist rallying cry you want — “Our State,” “The People’s University,” or any other wince-inducing sabre rattling you feel necessary to justify your existence as the shortest guy standing at the uri-nals, but Lord, don’t step into the inky blackness of pure insanity. Starkville is an urban road bump, a collection of misbegotten farmland tethered by the kind of lost highways that aren’t Steve Earle songs — they’re simply dead-end frames around a no man’s land of cultural advancement, the “After” pictures anti-Walmart lobbyists put in pamphlets.

You threw Johnny Cash in jail. You think “The Client” is a suitable rebuttal to our celebration of “The Sound and the Fury.” Your culinary mystique is a tangled web of Applebee’s peppered with so many Sonics that I have to assume there’s a city-wide mandate on Cherry Limeade accessibility, lest the native palate go unsatisfied. Your Balkan-esque landscape is so devoid of charm that it even depresses the frayed ball-cap, F-150 lift kit crowd from other crappy ag schools visiting for football games. Compared to you, Clemson is a clear spring morning in Barcelona.

This is my personal line in the sand. I’ve more than enjoyed the devout faith you’ve thrown toward a career minded snake oil salesman in Mullen. And to be fair, I’ve even more enjoyed the large lot of Rebel fans who “totally don’t care” about his lowest common denominator rivalry bat-ing, but totally do.

Yet, I’ll not stand by and let you brazenly spit into the wind that sweeps together Bill Faulkner, Ventress Hall, Blue Mountain, Willie Morris, R.L. Burnside, The Gin, The Hoka, Ajax, The Grocery, The Square, Sardis Lake, Taylor, South Lamar Boulevard, and the very fabric, the actual natural geography of our fair home (WE HAVE BEAUTIFUL, ROLLING HILLS. DEAL WITH IT).

Do you think I could attend Mississippi State and then lay claim, a decade later, to friends who own candy shops, recording studios and bars in fair Starkville? Thriving locally owned business sup-ported by a network of passionate alumni and loyal locals? Of course not — no ties bind anyone to that collection of parking lots and red brick other than to fulfill a list of course requirements, meet a mate and fill the pews of a Rankin County mega-church.

What happens on the field between Ole Miss and State is likely destined to be nothing more sub-stantial than tit for tat among inmates fighting for the bottom bunk. I’ve got no delusions about that, but if the maroon among you wants an admission, I absolutely believe in my heart and soul that Oxford is better than Starkville, better than State and better than whatever neurotic, petty jort sporting idiot on hold for talk radio thinks about those damn dirty Rebels. And if that happens to describe some-one like you, then yes, we’re better than you in fair Lafayette County.

Tell you what — attract a single nationally respected newspaper, magazine or TV program to spotlight Starkville positively in the next calendar year and I’ll physically eat this newspaper column in The Junction.

Until then, we’ll keep handing out numbers so the travel writers of the New York Times can inter-view us in an orderly fashion. It’s just impossible walking around and looking this unforgettable.Or to better convey my point in the pettiest of competitive banter: “Scoreboard.”

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