Thank God for Mississippi

Thank God for Mississippi. If it weren’t for Mississippi some other state, like the one I live in, for instance, would be last, 50^th out of 50 in something. Mississippi is the state that is rated last in education however which way to measure it. In Mississippi, if you are dumber than a bag of hammers that might qualify you for your school’s honor roll.

 

The proof really is in the pudding. Take for example an error of oversight discovered by Mississippi resident Ranjan Batra.

Ranjan Batra went to see Spielberg’s latest triumph, the movie “Lincoln” a must-see movie based on an account of history reported in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals” in which Abraham Lincoln resorted to desperate politics in order to get his 13^th Amendment passed to put an end to slavery in America forever. He did some independent research and discovered that 3/4ths of the extant states at the time had ratified the amendment, leaving 4 of the 5 remaining states to ratify the amendment by 1865.

Not surprisingly to most of us, Mississippi was the lone holdout. Further research revealed that Mississippi had actually ratified the amendment – in 1995. Better late than never, I guess. But that act was never made official by notifying the US Archivist, a necessary requirement.

One person can nullify the whole process, you see, simply by forgetting to send a letter to DC to let them know what they did. It was an error of oversight, they claimed.

Now stupid is as stupid does, and it is plausible that Mississippi’s Secretary of State might have been ignorant of the fact that he had to notify the Archivist, getting back to the 50^th of 50 in education theme, but I doubt it. And it could be that the Secretary of State was too preoccupied that day and simply forgot to get that letter drafted, but there, too, I am extremely skeptical.

More likely, I think, the error of oversight came from the fact that Mississippi once had a lot of overseers.