“I was God’s own drunk and a fearless man and that’s when I first saw the bear…I said, ‘Mr. Bear, you know in the eyes of the Lord, we’re both beasts when it comes right down to it, so I want you to be my buddy, Buddy bear’…Looked like one of them damn bears in the circus.”
—Jimmy Buffett

ROLLING FORK—I like bears. I really do.I live in a town right up the road from where the entire Teddy Bear  legend and iconic Americaana toy were born. I put out the newspaper in  the town that has become almost synonymous with bears in this state, a  town where once a year we throw this huge Affair with a Bear, a town  

where big ole chainsaw-carved images of bears simply teem and abound. To continue the “God’s Own Drunk” theme which is appropriate to this  in more ways than one, “There’s ole’ rare bear, tall bear, Freddy bear, Kelly bear, really bear, smelly the bear, smokey the bear, pokey  the bear. I want you to go back over there tonight and tell them I’m  feelin’ right. You tell them I love each and everyone of them like a  brother and a sister.”

But, will somebody now tell me, which, any, each or all of those bears  has the first damn thing on earth to do with Ole Miss? And yes,  Faulkner did write the short story that folks in these parts argue was  based on hunt in this county, but come on now, folks, that’s a pretty  

big reach for a mascot. Sports program mascots are nice enough things, it seems to me. Baylor  university has a bear as its mascot. One of the 8,000 universiites of  California has a golden bear for its mascot. And those,  coincidentally, are also the nicknames of those college sports teams— the Baylor Bears and the Cal Golden Bears.

The University of Mississippi, my university which is affectionately  known to us as Ole Miss, also has a nickname for its sports teams, the  Rebels, the Ole Miss Rebels. And so, though I seek not to be  redundant, I must once again ask: How the hell have we somehow now  ended up with some stupid dressed up bear parading along the sidelines  of football games and the like as the school’s official mascot?

To do such a thing, it seems to me, would only make the first lick of  sense if my university had also decided to change its sports nickname  of some longstanding—to become, instead of Rebels, the Ole Miss  Dressed-up Bears. And nobody other than the fans of that other  university over in Starkville or the apostates of evil who favor a  certain school in Louisiana should laugh too hard (and this might be a  hint, boys and girls, they already are) about that, since it may well  be the next thing coming down the road to Oxford.

But then again, nothing about his entire new mascot business has made  the first lick of sense from the get-go. This, instead, is just  exactly the kind of literal nonsense that always seems to happen when  even the best meaning people mixup a good and needed thing, sensitivity —image sensitivity, racial sensitivity and the like—with a bad thing,  political correctness for its sake, of the sort that this has just  screamingly manifested.

If it seemed that Colonel Rebel looked too much like the old Southern  plantation owner (which it did NOT, by the way represent), then tweek  that image some so as not to offend without  throwing it away to be  replaced by this asinine bear “thing” that’s just nuts.

Hoddy Toddy, Gosh A’mighty,

How silly can we be?

(Award-winning columnist Ray Mosby is publisher of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.)