Michael Barone offers a somewhat different take on Michael Vick, dogfighting and Virginia history:
It’s astonishing and saddening that a man would risk his $130 million football contract to engage in such behavior, which seems barbaric to almost all of us. Where did he even get the idea of doing this?
I got an answer, or rather clues to an answer, while rereading David Hackett Fischer’s superb Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. In his chapter on how the original settlers of Virginia brought with them folkways from their home territory in Wessex (southwestern England), Fischer notes another striking characteristic of Virginians—their obsession with gambling. Virginians were observed to be constantly making wagers with one another on almost any imaginable outcome. The more uncertain the result, the more likely they were to gamble. They made bets not only on horses, cards, cockfighting, and backgammon but also on crops, prices, women, and the weather. “They are all professional gamesters,” a French traveler observed of Virginia’s gentry.”… Colonel Byrd is never happy but when he has the box and dice in his hand.”
The rest of the entry is worth reading, if only to get a sense of our blood-soaked past…which, like so many things in this Commonwealth, seems like only yesterday.
