the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

BAD RESULTS TRUMP GOOD INTENTIONS 47
made it distressingly easy for the city’s notorious child killer to hide vic-
tims’ bodies. And at the turn of the 21st century, there was a creeping po-
litical irony to it all: The states that now form the core of conservative
Republican power in America are slowly being strangled by one of the few
thriving parts of Franklin Roo sevelt’s legacy.
“Good, bad, or indifferent: no matter how we see it, kudzu has
settled in and won’t be budged,” wrote Lembke in Despicable Species.
“Roots in the earth, leaves to the sun, it will persist until the last trump.
I’ve thought of comparing it to phenomena I find obnoxious, like the wild
proliferation of pounding boom boxes or the unchecked spread of concrete
lawn geese and decorative nylon banners, but no, there’s nothing
faddish about the plant. It’s a force of nature, more on the order of azaleas
and tobacco, country music, coon hunts, NASCAR races, and good old
boys. It just plain is. Certainly, nothing obliges us to like it, but because
we must live with it, the least painful way to come to terms with the doggone
stuff may indeed be to see it as a heritage.”
If you listen closely to Lembke’s words, though, you can hear the
unambiguous snap of a briskly waving white fl ag.
DID KUDZU KILL THE KUDZU KING?
Channing Cope, an agricultural columnist for the Atlanta Constitution
in the late 1930s and early 1940s, did everything he could to promote
kudzu as a wondrous plant capable of solving any number of the problems
that plagued the American South during that period. Part evangelist, part
huckster, Cope labeled himself the “Kudzu King” and hailed the plant in
print and on radio. He also established the Kudzu Club of America in the
early 1940s, and its stated goal was to plant a million acres of kudzu in
Georgia and 8 million acres of it across the South.
What few people know, however, is that kudzu played out in Cope’s
life like the demon in a novel by Stephen King, who has, in fact, used
kudzu colonies in his fiction as the dark realm of monsters.
At the height of his fame, Cope delivered a daily radio broadcast