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Here's my story. I am from Alabama. My family consists of degreed professionals who are well-read, well-traveled, well-mannered, well-dressed, and reasonably accomplished. No Steve Jobs among my two brothers, my sister, my mother, our respective spouses, and myself, but we have all succeeded in our respective professions with post-graduate degrees, executive positions, and the what not. We are well above the curve in terms of household income, education, wit, and whatever else yardstick you choose to name. We do not speak like the cast of the Beverly Hillbillies, we certainly are not a bunch of fundamentalists, and there's not a coon dog, a shotgun or a fishing rod among us.
So my brother was a screenwriter in LA. Not a 'screenwriter' who parks cars and tends bar, but an actual screenwriter whose credits you can find on IMDB.com. Ran with the Hollywood crowd. And met a woman, fell in love, and got engaged.
Mind you, we're socially adept people with a flair for conversation who can pretty much hold our own anywhere we go. But we were absolutely shocked at our treatment in LA. We were thrilled to fly out for the wedding only to be essentially treated like bumpkins by her family and friends the entire time. Mind you, we don't look at things from a class perspective, but it's not as if this girl's family were plutocrats. They were basically a middle-class family, certainly not better off than any of us. My mother, sister, wife, and sister-in-law were not invited by her mother to any of the pre-wedding bridal luncheons. Her mother couldn't be bothered to talk to my mother. We couldn't decide whether these people were clueless or trying to find ways to be rude.
And then it got worse at the wedding, an sunset ceremony held at a gorgeous home on the bluffs of Malibu. The reception devolved into an LA-type of thing with movie people talking to movie people, all of them looking as if they had just rolled out of bed.
I remember having one conversation with a writer, who turned out to be a reasonable person, when he was joined by another writer type. They began having a discussion about literary theory, so I joined in to their shock. "You mean you've heard Deconstruction? And you're from Alabama? Wow." As if I were some idiot savant. Never mind that I've read Derrida and Frye. Never mind that the South has probably contributed more great writers per capita to American literature than any other part of the country. Never mind that the South broke enormous amounts of ground in that arena with New Criticism. Nope. I was from Alabama.
Here was another. Some guy actually made an effort to converse.
"Oh, so you're from Alabama, right?"
"Yes, I am."
"Were you excited to get on a plane and fly allllllll the way out here?"
"Well, that was neat. But you know what really excited me?"
"What's that?"
"These are only the third pair of shoes I've ever owned." The guy stopped for a second.
"Okay. I said something wrong, didn't I?"
"Well, sorry. But I've been hearing that stuff all night and you were just the last straw." Then, after that we had a nice thirty-minute conversation, one of the few enjoyable ones of the night.
I dunno. Maybe it was because it was the Hollywood crowd. I travel a LOT on biz and am treated as if I have a brain. But every once in a while, I run into some halfwit who thinks hailing from the South makes you a stump-necked, gap-toothed, knuckle-dragging, polyester-wearing, stoop-gait, slack-jawed, cousin-kissing, book-burning, backwoods lackwit. Typically these people are not too hard to deal with and they never realize the irony that they are actually the bigots who indulge in lazy stereotyping.
Face it, despite what you claimed in another post about the South having liberals, conservatives, etc.
No, there are no liberals in the South. Very, very few white southern liberals. Not one statewide office is now held by a democrat, and never will be for the long forseeable future. Minority democratic voters are cordoned off into gerrymandered isolated boxes that are overwhelmed by the white southern vote in statewide elections.
I thought this article worth repeating. Not sure if you saw this in the Daily Beast.
And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)
But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”
Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.
It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.
The comments were priceless. But this one from a guy in Texas makes a good point that we should all really start to think about rationally. The USA is done. North and South do not belong together anymore. It's over. We are just too far different from each other.
Comment from Marvintyson
I have to agree with one point here. The South should be a separate country. Seriously, we are separate already in everything but name. Look at the language in political and social sites from around the country. The author, while saying that Southerners are basically good people, decry us as a group of racist rednecks. At the same time conservatives bitterly denounce liberals as "wanting to destroy America".
I am 65 years old and have been politically active all my life. And, the battle cry of both liberals and conservatives after each and every loss is "We must take back America!" But, who shall we take it back from?
Are Americans of different political persuasion or different social mores not American? We have gone too far. Like a couple that has grown so far in different directions that the marriage has become unsalvageable, we should separate for the good of future generations before this bitterness grows.
If we go our separate ways now, we can part as friends who were once countrymen. But, if we stay yoked together, each trying to force the other to live "our way", we will become like members of a chain gang looking only for who can strike the most damaging blow.
Texas has a very large and growing separatist movement, so this is what I propose; Let us cast a ballot in a free and fair referendum on Independence, and if it passes (it will) we can sit down at the negotiating table as friends and settle things like free trade, borders (hopefully with a time of absolute freedom of movement, so that liberal Texans can leave if the desire, and conservatives from elsewhere can move here), mutual defense, currency, etc.
I understand that the emotional side of this is hard to wrap our heads around, I come from a very long line of military vets, and I was an infantry platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam, so it was hard for me too. And, I know there will be folks reading this who can't get by this. They will say "We settled that in 1865!"
But cooler heads must prevail on this, it's the only way to restore freedom and personal liberty to us all. I have no desire to force anyone to live "my way", and I don't think my fellow Texans do either. Think about it with an open mind.
I am a party agnostic, but you're kind of a lazy thinker, aren't you? Parroting that article doesn't make you well-read. It just makes you an ideological stooge.
In truth, if you look at map of the United States by results in the 2014 congressional elections, you'll see that aside from a few enclaves on the coast and places such as Minnesota, huge swaths of the country have turned Republican over the past three elections. In fact, if you start at Washington State's southernmost congressional district and draw a line southeast through the country, you can literally go coast-to-coast without hitting a single Democratic congressional district. That's a shocking reversal of political fortunes.
This didn't happen because the country turned sharply right, but because the Democratic leadership ignored the country in ideological terms, infected by their weird tone-deafness and post-election hubris. The Republicans also now hold majorities in 31 state houses too, winning previously safe governor's mansions in places such as Illinois and Maryland. So is the idiot author of that article going to dump most of the Midwest and the Mountain States, too?
The author of that article cannot seem to understand that the Democrats have not paid attention to what the country truly wants and have paid the price in three consecutive congressional elections, going from an incredible majority in both houses of Congresses to achieving a minority not seen since FDR won in 1932. It's the journalistic equivalent of a temper tantrum, and not one befitting anyone who claims to be a thinker.
Hm... No, not really. Most everyone has been very warmly receptive of the idea that I'm from NC. I have a very neutral-sounding American accent, though.
I too am from the south, South Carolina to be exact. You ask do they treat me as fool? Yes, but only when I don't drink Dos Equis.
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Ironically enough the places were people have tried to treat me like a fool have typically been in other southern cities.
Last edited by sandlapper; 12-14-2014 at 07:36 PM..
The bias against the south comes from the media, mostly the entertainment media.
Yes, the media is mostly guilty for the stereotypes like trailer parks, low income white people, sub-par dental hygiene, pick-up trucks, swamp people, incomprehensible accents and slavery. A shame really, I met the friendliest, most helpful Americans in the South.
They find great fun in shaming and destroying the most culturally rich region in the entire country as they swarm it. You can witness this right here on these forums. I can picture the sick psychotic grins on their faces when I read many of their comments.
Amusingly enough, when I was in Boston for work last year, people asked about the accent, but they were more curious, not condescending like the Midwesterners.
If it makes you feel any better, that's exactly the kind of "reception" I got from the majority in SoCal and I'm not from the South, I'm a Midwesterner who comitted the sin of not living in Chicago. It was funny when I'd get the treatment, turn it around, and make a fool out of the fool. Small victories against ignorance, just like yours...but I've never been anywhere else in the country that held stronger disdain for "flyover" than Southern California, which is ironic considering how few true natives or at least people who'd been in the area for generations there were.
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to this whole post.
