About 1,000 people are expected for the “Worship on the Water” sunrise service on Easter morning on the Flora-Bama Roadhouse Lounge beach: Flora-Bama

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

So we need your help, dear readers, to settle an argument.

Glynn Wilson

Would you rather read a factual story? Or a legend that may or may not be all true?

Is it OK to tell a white lie now and then to save someone from grief or pain?

For much of my life and career, being a serious, hard news reporter, I came down on the side of telling the truth, even if that meant exposing a white lie that might somehow serve a larger purpose. Perhaps I have mellowed with age, but maybe I can now see the benefit of legend.

In spite of what my critics who do not know me like to say about me, I’ve always been one to “tell the truth to a fault.”

If you Google that phrase, you will see that it refers to people who never tell a lie, even if it means bringing harm or discomfort to them.

Remember the legend of “Honest Abe” about Abraham Lincoln? It was a great campaign slogan that propelled him to the presidency. But was it really always true? Was he honest to a fault? There’s still a great debate about that.

Baldwin County, Alabama

Once, back in the late 1980s, I got tired of hearing a promotional pitch about Baldwin County, Alabama, being “the largest county by land area east of the Mississippi River.” So I did the research. It wasn’t true, but ole Jimmy Faulkner and the chamber of commerce in Baldwin County used the line as a promotional device.

I’m still not sure why they thought it was so cool, but after I exposed it as a lie, they stopped using it. Was that a good thing or a bad thing in the long run? You decide.

Legend of the Meteorite

That’s me by the “meteorite” in New Orleans’ Audubon Park: Dave Stueber

Back in June of 2001, I was living in New Orleans teaching and writing. For fun and exercise, I used to play golf with some friends, including author Rick Bragg who was still writing for the New York Times then, at the cheap, public golf course in Audubon Park uptown.

One day I heard the legend of the “meteorite” on the course. But upon inspection, I doubted the story. So I did some research and wrote the real story in the alternative weekly in New Orleans, Gambit Weekly. Since the online archives were inundated by the flood during Hurricane Katrina and were no longer up, I republished the story in The Southerner magazine, where you can still read it today.

The truth was that the Newhouse newspaper in town, the Times-Picayune, had started the meteorite hoax on April Fool’s Day in 1891, but the story caught on and stuck.

The truth is the so-called meteorite at Audubon Park, which is still there on the renovated executive course with a plaque explaining its history, is a chunk of iron ore from Birmingham’s Red Mountain. It didn’t drop in from outer space. It was dropped there by a fool public relations man from Alabama, and sat there too heavy to move after the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition ended in 1885.

After the story came out we were playing golf one day and Bragg said to me, I kid you not, “I liked the meteorite story better.”

So you see some people like the legend more than the facts.

Legend or Fact?

Where does the phrase “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” come from?

It is a line from John Ford’s 1962 western film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Movie historians call it “one of the most resonant lines in movie history. It has been used as everything from a metaphor for Ford’s own legendary career to a commentary on our present political situation.”

See a discussion of that here

See the scene in this video:

Easter

Meanwhile, since it is Easter weekend, I would be intrigued to know your thoughts on another sensational and controversial story going around on the web now.

Is there really a hell?

According to the story, Pope Francis was recently interviewed by journalist Eugenio Scalfari, who asked: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Pope Francis said that bad souls “are not punished … those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

After the story was linked on the Drudge Report, conservative Catholic commentator and columnist Pat Buchanan had a conniption fit, writing a column under the headline: Did the Pope Commit Rank Heresy?

“What did Christ die on the cross to save us from?” Buchanan asked. “If Francis made such a statement, it would be rank heresy.”

Maybe the pope was just telling the truth as he sees it.

So would you rather read a myth and a Bible story about a God creating the world in seven days and sending his son to earth to die on a cross to save the world from sin and hell? Or would you rather hear the truth that the universe was created by the Big Bang and evolved out of chaos?

We welcome your thoughts.

Just yesterday, I was talking on the phone with Pat McClellan, vice president and one of the partners in the Flora-Bama Roadhouse Lounge along the Alabama-Florida line. He said there will most likely be about a thousand people who will turn out for the sunrise service at the bar on Sunday morning. Only in Alabama do they hold church services at a bar.

Read about the legend of the Flora-Bama here.