It’s about time

Congratulations to the University of Mississippi for severing its lingering association with Colonel Reb, the mascot who so plainly demeaned the Lost Cause nostalgics and ignorant peckerwoods who constitute the heart and soul of the Magnolia State. We can only imagine the silent humiliation that Mississippi’s long-suffering whites endured over the past few decades as their rich culture and history was caricatured as nothing more than the old, dopey remnant of a traitorous and defeated master class, distorted for undignified game-day thrills and for the transient lucre of cheap merchandise. We can only hope that the university’s new mascot more accurately conveys the sophistication and forward-looking sensibilities of Mississippi’s current generation of white bigots. And so perhaps one day soon, the Ole Miss Haley Barbours will celebrate the school’s first SEC football championship since 1963, breaking the hex that Freedom Summer laid upon the state the following year.