One of my neighbors is a New Jersey transplant (insert your own joke here), and in a sidewalk chat the other day he remarked on the extraordinary amount of news recently about insider dealing, pocket-lining, and general sleaziness among our elected officials in North Carolina. I thought: Boy, when a guy from Jersey is complaining about our political corruption, things must really be bad.

What I realized is that reading the daily trickle of news about former Gov. Mike Easley, his wife and his various henchmen/stooges is like watching a faucet with a slow drip — the individual drops don’t seem like much until somebody points out that a bathtub’s worth of water has gone down the drain. That’s what we’re experiencing in North Carolina politics now. The accumulated weight of current allegations, past convictions and moral turpitude (I’m looking in your direction, John Edwards) is enough to make a Chicago alderman look away in shame. Or come here for lessons.

The greater problem is that political corruption is particularly tenacious. Like kudzu, it spreads relentlessly in all directions. The Easleys didn’t leave questions hanging over just the governor’s mansion. Their employment — Mike as governor, Mary as a glorified, highly overpaid events coordinator at N.C. State University — also left both the university system and the N.C. Highway Patrol facing investigations. In fact, between the Easleys and Edwards, the federal grand jury in Raleigh sees more traffic in and out of its chambers these days than a mining-town bordello.

But my neighbor is the best barometer. If he’s sentimental about the relative honesty of New Jersey, we’ve got a serious image problem.

Three years ago this summer, I drove to Camp Lejeune on a Friday afternoon to pick up my son. He’d been granted a “96″ — four days of leave — and because he’s a collector of strays I wasn’t surprised, when I arrived, to find a second passenger awaiting me: another young Marine who needed a lift to Raleigh. He was introduced to me simply as Damas. (Marine grunts, I learned early on, deal almost exclusively in last names.)

My son and Damas tossed their gear into the trunk and climbed in the car. It turned out that Damas had a brother in Charlotte, and that the bus station in Raleigh had been designated as their meet-up spot. Both my son and Damas were in the middle of infantry school prior to their first deployments to Iraq, and I listened as they talked about their training. Where my son is Southern and self-effacing, Damas was from New York City and brashly confident. They seemed like an odd pair of buddies. Then again, the Marine Corps is a perfect meritocracy in the sense that its most capable members are quickly identified and acknowledged. The two young Marines in my car were some of those: They were already good at the job of harnessing lethality, and knew it. So of course they’d be pals. In that line of work, cultural differences always give way to competence.

It was well after dark by the time we arrived at the Raleigh bus station. Damas’ brother wasn’t there yet, and a cell phone call revealed he was still at least an hour away. We were in for a long night. Marines don’t leave each other on the battlefield, nor do they leave each other in bus stations. As the evening crept slowly toward midnight, we waited in the car. I didn’t mind. I like the idea that Marines look after each other.

Eventually a pair of headlights loomed in my rearview mirror. Damas got out, transferred his gear from my car to his brother’s, and they set off for Charlotte. He and my son ended up in different battalions after their infantry training, so I never ran into him again. In fact, it was only a few days ago that I learned his first name: Leopold.

You probably know where this is going. The reason I learned his full name is because I read it in the newspaper. Lance Corporal Leopold Damas was killed Aug. 17 by the Taliban in Afghanistan. This war is now personal.

I wish I could remember whether I shook his hand. I hope I did.

I recently caught up with Dennis Rogers, the legendary (and I don’t use that word lightly) columnist who spent nearly four decades chronicling life in eastern Carolina. I’m happy to report that aside from a bout of pneumonia earlier this year, Dennis is hale, hearty and curmudgeonly as ever: “The older I get, the more I can’t tolerate heat, humidity and buttheads,” he said.

I’m with you, brother. Except I don’t mind heat and humidity.

Dennis retired from the newspaper business two years ago this month. His first order of business was to buy a recreational vehicle, dubbed the Wiggly Pig, and set off across America with wife HollyAnn. Their travels were detailed in a series of dispatches from the road, the first of which you can read here. After nine months or so of near-endless movement, Dennis and HollyAnn parked the RV in Oxford, where they now live. Dennis and I traded a series of let’s-have-lunch email messages over the past year, and finally got together yesterday.

It was an August afternoon in North Carolina, and Dennis had me for company. He suffered all three intolerables mentioned above at once.

Talking with him for an hour reminded me of what the N&O lost when he left the business. Dennis is funny as ever, and still a first-class raconteur. The newspaper business won’t see the likes of him again, and that’s a loss for readers. But we miss him more than he misses the business, I think. In many ways, it’s a refuge for oddballs and misfits, and while we both happily acknowledge belonging to both categories it can make for a bizarre professional life — one whose dysfunction is apparent only after you’re gone from it.

That’s a long way of saying, Dennis looks doggone happy these days. He’s helping a buddy with a book, and leading a remarkably disciplined life for a retiree: No television or alcohol before 5 pm. That last part is crazy, but what do you expect? You can put a man in a bouncy RV and send him all over the country, but you can’t shake all the Baptist out of him.