Welcome to Bizarro World.
In this world, Ole Miss won the Southeastern Conference's Western Division in 2003, has three football national championships, is LSU's biggest rival and thinks it's kosher to say things like, "The South shall rise again."
What a truly strange existence they've got going on roughly 350 miles up the road in Oxford, Miss.
Well, in the real world — where the rest of us spend most of our free time — these things couldn't be further from the truth.
Since the SEC expanded in 1991 and went to its current divisional format in 1992, the league has hosted 17 league championship games between the winners of the Eastern
Division and the Western Division. Ole Miss has never made the trip to Atlanta.
In fact, in 2003, LSU won the division by traveling to Oxford and embarrassing star quarterback Eli Manning. Ole Miss is the only school in the West to never represent the division in the SEC championship game.
Likewise, Ole Miss' three national championships in football are purely fiction. That's "fantasy" for you Ole Miss alums. The NCAA doesn't recognize any of these fabricated achievements. None of Ole Miss' 1959, 1960 or 1962 squads were recognized as the best in the nation by the Associated Press or any of the other institutions the NCAA recognizes.
The notion that most LSU fans or players recognize the Rebels as a rival is false as well. Ole Miss is more of a pest to the Tigers than an actual competitor.
LSU holds a 55-38-4 all-time record against Ole Miss and has won seven of the nine games so far this millennium. This is not a rivalry — it's more an annual throttling.
The strangest part about Ole Miss is the general backlash from students and Rebel supporters alike against a proposal to change the words to the ending of some silly song their band plays, "From Dixie with Love."
The song was threatened to be banned earlier this year by the university for some objectionable lyrics it contained.
The ending line used to be "And the South shall rise again." The school is attempting to change the lyrics to "To hell with LSU."
Way to stay classy, Rebels.
It's fine LSU is the new supposed target of the Rebels' rage — that's not the issue.
Ole Miss' envy of LSU's success is pretty hilarious. They would go out of their way to damn
it to hell even when the two schools aren't even playing — pathetic.
The real issue here is the song before the proposed change.
At some point, Ole Miss fans thought yelling about a potential second uprising of a failed nation was a good idea. This is the most repugnant notion I've ever heard.
The whole situation is such a poor reflection on not just Ole Miss — which, admittedly, no one really thinks highly of anyway — but the entire Southern region of the United States.
The chant has been labeled as racist by its opponents, thus the need for a change — but I disagree. The chant in itself isn't racist, but the people supporting it seemingly are.
The Mississippi chapter of the Ku Klux Klan is planning an on-campus march in support of the South rising again, as well as keeping the phrase "The South will rise again" a part of the Ole Miss song, according to various news outlets near Oxford.
But racism isn't only from outside the school. An Ole Miss student, Michael Hudec, was featured in a video posted on YouTube about the cheer — a video that has since gone viral. In the video, Hudec drops a few f-bombs, a few n-bombs and says he supports the South rising again. It's sure to do wonders for recruiting those black athletes Ole Miss relies upon so heavily.
The chant and its supporters reek of racist overtones and overall stupidity about the Civil War. Anyone who knows anything about history would never think the South will rise again — at least any time soon.
Did the people at Ole Miss fall asleep in American history class? The South got spanked for the better part of four years during the war, and quite frankly, I don't want to see Atlanta burned down.
When people yell about a Southern uprising at the top of their lungs like it's something the majority of us believe in, we Southerners look like the backward yokels, as the rest of the country generally characterizes us.
It's fine for people to be idiots, and at Ole Miss, it appears idiocy is being celebrated with this cheer. But seriously, the Rebels and their fans need to keep this junk at home and away from college football.
I guess we as college football fans and citizens of the South shouldn't expect any better from Ole Miss.
They sing "Dixie," wave their confederate flags around proudly and, up until a few years ago, had a Colonel Sanders-looking "Southern Gentleman" roaming the sidelines as their mascot.
It's just a different, ignorant, racist way of life they have in Oxford.
Bizarro World, indeed.
Johanathan Brooks is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Powder Springs, Ga. Follow him on twitter@TDR_jbrooks.
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Contact Johanathan Brooks at jbrooks@lsureveille.com
Babbling Brooks: Oxford, Miss., is a strange place
Published: Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Updated: Thursday, November 19, 2009 01:11
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