Bill Earngey

In South West City, Mo., at Missouri's southwest border, an 1821 stone marker is inscribed "Mis. 1821" and "Ark." (no date; still a Territory). Statehood brings a wealth of riches to the privileged few.

  A 36o30' north latitude survey line here also designates the southern border for the 1820 Missouri Compromise, a Congressional decree pairing slave- and no-slave (free) states for simultaneous statehood, thereby balancing Congressional votes, for or against slavery.

  The line was shot due west from the 1767 Mason-Dixon Line along the southern border of Pennsylvania and parts of the borders of Maryland , Delaware , and today's West Virginia.

  It was surveyed to settle an 80-year property dispute between two rich Englishmen: the Calvert family who owned a royal charter for Maryland and the Penn family who were given Pennsylvania and Delaware by the Duke of York.

  Mark Knopfler ("Sailing To Philadelphia") describes Jeremiah Dixon: "I am a Geordie [JOR-dee-boy]/A glass of wine with you, sir/And the ladies I'll enjoy ... It was my fate from birth/To make my mark upon the earth ..."

  And Charlie Mason: "A stargazer am I/It seems that I was born/To chart the evening sky/They'd cut me out for baking bread/But I had other dreams instead ..."

  "We are sailing to Philadelphia/A world away from the coaly tyne/Sailing to Philadelphia/To draw the line/A Mason-Dixon line ..."

  Not until the Civil War did the Mason-Dixon Line become romanticized as the division between the North and the South.

  During Reconstruction, the Line was not romantic to Southerners suffering this division between the rich North and the poor South for 10 years.

  So, what's the big deal here? Not much, just more blah-blah about rich folks and politics merging into ungodly profits from what workies build and then pay for later.

  "What it is," Knopfler says, "The ghost of Dirty Dick is still in search of Little Nell."

  Exxon's 2008 first-quarter profits were $14.8 billion. The corporation was disappointed with this bottom line.

  Where do you draw the line?