‘View’ of Whoopi makes little sense

As someone who once lived in the heart of Newport News, Va., and, in fact, in Michael Vick’s school district, I was amused to hear Whoopi Goldberg’s assessment that dogfighting is endemic to the Deep South and the sophisticates of our urban jungles do not understand.

Vick’s supporters sometimes appear to want it both ways.

One day he is from the mean streets of Newport News and the next day he is from the Deep South.

I happened to live on one of those mean streets of Newport News, and not once did I ever have to dodge bullets after parking the car in the driveway and making my way to the front door of my humble abode.

Not once did I ever have to shoo away the neighborhood prowler from the premises.

It is true that the owner of the neighborhood convenience store had the obligatory bars on the front windows, but I always suspected it was more out of being extra cautious than being a frequent victim of robbery.

And there was a nearby used-car dealership that never sold any cars, which seemed peculiar at the time. But who knows whether it was a front to launder money?

It’s also true that a neighborhood drunk once walked into my place unannounced. But that was as much on me as him.

One feature of my eternally modest dwellings is I leave the doors unlocked.

Anyway, the drunk was nice enough, if not incoherent, and I would have invited him to stay and have a cold one with me if I had been up to the challenge on that particular night.

But he went on his merry way — stumbled, actually — and that was the only highlight of my existence while living on the mean streets of Newport News.

Sorry. I must have missed the neighborhood memo on dogfighting, although lots of my neighbors owned dogs. Not that any of them looked all that ferocious unless you are put off by a dog that is wagging its tail in a furious fashion.

And I obviously missed the cultural-training sessions.

“He’s from the South, the Deep South,” Goldberg said of Vick. “That is part of his cultural upbringing.”

Our working-class, mixed-race neighborhood had patches of poverty, along with shipyard workers, service-industry folks and the one idiot who worked at the local newspaper. The streets might have appeared mean to outsiders, but none of us felt that way.

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