Don't Go Back to Cookeville
I cannot let a reference to Cookeville, Tennessee go by without crudely mentioning one of my favorite articles, and the only I ever wrote for Salon, about a muckraking Beverly Hills journalist named Geoff Davidian who by total chance got sucked into Cookeville's murky Good-Old-Boy politics, including wild tales of drug dealing, cover-ups and possible murder, and as a result launched an angry local newsletter/website thing called The Putnam Pit, named after the county. One of Davidian's many colorful quotes in there was: "This is not funny. I'm not making this up. People are dead. People are DEAD." Then less than two weeks later, someone was dead -- State Senator Tommy Burks, who was killed (at least that's what the conviction says) by his opponent in the upcoming election, a cat named Byron "Low Tax" Looper.
I visited Cookeville twice after the Burks murder, got roped into all kinds of Davidian shenanigans, listened to a lot of locals reckon that Looper would have to be convicted "even if he was innocent," and filled enough notebooks to write two books. Needless to say, I may have written a total of two blog posts…. At any rate, the first story is still good for a chuckle.
