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© 2004 Aaron Street Introduction Essay for Arkansas 24/7 The Common Ground By John Brummett Arkansas could use a new adjective, one not yet coined, one whose Webster's definition might read something like this: more than diverse, to the point of contradictory, even peculiar; suggesting charm, although not quite that benign. The state has the Ozark Mountains on the northwest corner and a river delta region on the southeast. And that's relevant mostly as a metaphor for uncommon difference. Yes, most states proudly claim wide diversity, but they probably mean geographic and demographic diversity. Here we're talking about economics and culture--and more about disparity than diversity. It is in this regard that Arkansas offers the traveler a five-hour drive from Mars to Venus. Northwest Arkansas is home to what the Milken Institute has called the nation's strongest regional economy. East Arkansas, pressed against the Mississippi River and filled in and leveled for soybeans, rice, and cotton, contends as locale for the nation's direst poverty. But somehow the mountains and the Delta find common ground, and that is where college football and basketball players called Razorbacks are idolized and half the state goes deer or duck hunting, while nearly everyone else is either fishing, hiking, shopping at Wal-Mart, or caressing Wal-Mart stock. Depending on the season, some might be asplash in water recreation at a glistening man-made lake or watching the likely Kentucky Derby favorite win the Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs. The Arkansas of these contradictions and these photographs, seeming on the surface to lack a cohesive identity, can exhibit a bit of a complex: Is it southwest, southeast, or mid-south? The answer is that to be Arkansas is to be flavored by all those compass points, and for the flavors to have married over time: a dash of Mississippi to the southeast, Texas to the southwest, Oklahoma to the due west, and Missouri to the north. To negotiate this stew, politicians need to be powerful talents. Perhaps you've heard of Bill Clinton. He has been called "Saturday Night Bill and Sunday Morning Clinton," meaning he might stay out late at the honky tonk but will be at the Baptist church the next morning to bellow in the choir. That kind of straddle is a standard Arkansas contortion. For decades, until a modernizing Republican governor out of New York named Winthrop Rockefeller shut down the lawbreaking in the 1960s, Hot Springs offered open gambling and a getaway for the likes of Al Capone. A resort town about an hour southwest of Little Rock, Hot Springs is also where Clinton grew up during those wide-open years and walked to the Baptist church carrying his Bible. Visitors to Little Rock, the largest and capital city almost squarely in the center of the state and a microcosm of it, can go to Central High School to recall the crisis of 1957, when then-Governor Orval Faubus defied the federal courts on integration. Then they can go to the Clinton Presidential Library to study a succeeding governor who so related to African Americans that author Toni Morrison called him the first black president. That's Arkansas defined, where progress is made and dull moments are few. Browse    View All    The Common Ground    Hearth & Home    Hard at Work    Arkansas at Play    Reason to Believe    Our Town Photos: 134 Photographers: 29 Towns: 41

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