By John Brummett

CLARENDON — I’m here in this poor Delta town, tucked against a levee that keeps the White River out, for the annual chamber of commerce banquet.

You’re wondering why. Well, why not? Anyway, a good friend and noble scion of Monroe County, lawyer-farmer Raymond Abramson, had invited me.

He told me that Attorney General Dustin McDaniel would be speaking.

I opted to go anyway.

The mayor would cook steaks. Three local teenage lads would play originally composed blues guitar. They call themselves “73 Miles from Memphis.” Clarendon is about that distance from Little Rock, too, but Little Rock doesn’t offer the blues cachet.

At a reception beforehand in Raymond’s law office, which is the only thing left of the main downtown strip that isn’t the courthouse or city hall or a funeral home or vacant, I meet the county judge, Larry Morris.

The very first thing he tells me, by way of hello, is that he needs money. Monroe County has the only county government in the state that collects nothing in local-option sales taxes. Last time they tried an election, they came up 60 or so votes short.

Morris, a bit of a card and spiffy in his starched khakis, regales me with jokes. A little later, state Sen. Jim Luker of Wynne, who represents this area, says he was glad to see me chatting with the judge. Maybe now I can become more sensitive, Luker says, to state legislators’ motivation in wanting to tap state government’s surpluses in the General Improvement Fund to help folks back home.

Fair enough. It was mostly the unaccountable procedure of local project funding that I found objectionable. That’s mostly fixed now. But, yes, there are columns back there instructing local communities to build their own community centers and let state government deal with bigger things.

That was Little Rock-centric. It was arrogant.

Abramson introduces me to Al Sliger, who runs the local community health center. Buoyed by forthcoming money from the state cigarette tax and the federal stimulus, the community center has acquired all those aforementioned vacant buildings in the block with Abramson’s office. It will soon be razing them to build a spanking new community health center.

This center has a full-time doctor, two other circuit-riding doctors including a pediatrician, a two-day-a-week dentist and a nurse practitioner. It also has an ever-full waiting room in a service area in which half the population is under the poverty level.

A tall, strapping fellow named Allen James introduces himself. He’s in the farm crop insurance business. He says it was a tough weekend for him on account of our Web site being down at arkansasnews.com.

That meant he couldn’t read my column or blog.

This is not something I had expected to hear in a part of the state where I don’t get published.

So I sit by Allen during the banquet and we visit amiably. His politics are moderately Democratic. He worked years ago on the staffs of former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers and former U.S. Rep. Beryl Anthony. His brother, Greg James, a local lawyer practicing specialty farm law, is in the National Guard and an Iraq War veteran, expert in the safe operation of high-tech weaponry.

As it happens, the last matter of business at the banquet is to honor Clarendon’s citizen of the year. It becomes apparent early in the recitation of the winner’s credentials that the person being honored is my new buddy seated to my left, crop-insuring and blog-reading Allen James.

I know that because Allen is groaning, plainly surprised and plainly rendered in some approximation of misery by his apparent inability to deal with praise.

It turned out that he’s chairman of the board of the levee district and was being credited for working hard and staying up all night last year to make sure the levee held against those raging White River floodwaters.

It’s good to get out once in a while. There’s enlightenment and public spiritedness out there, both among those you meet and for your own consumption.

McDaniel’s speech? It was fine, if a little Washington-centric and Little Rock-centric.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.