Lawyers, back me up: if a man is wearing boxing gloves, you can legally hit him in the mouth, right?
Miracle Mike Sebba and I used to amuse ourselves by discussing where and when in world history we would most like to live—Paris in the twenties, Greenwich Village in the fifties, Plato’s Athens, Da Vinci’s Venice. Strangely, Alabama and Mississippi never came up. At no time in recorded history was either of those states any fun. Even under the Cahokia—arguably its peak civilization, and certainly the one that consumed the least Jack-In-the-Box—Mississippi was a terrible place to live. And Alabama in the early sixties was an exciting, historically significant milieu only in context of the shittiness of all previous Alabamas. Both states consistently vie for the lowest literacy rate in the Union. But they were able to put aside their rivalry to agree on one thing: they love Rick Santorum.