I grew up down South, N.Va., when it was still Southern, Jewish,s o I was in the South but of it, and the thing to remember about the South is that Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner are deadpan realists. Do try to set aside the hateful contemptuous superiority that some Northerners, like Carl, display towards the South. Just because people drawl doesn't mean they are dumb, right wing, racist, violence-prone, or marry their sisters. Remember that M.L. King said that he didn't know what racism, stupidity, and violence were till he came to Chicago; or, one might say, closer to Carl, Bensonhurst. It was in New York that draft rioters strung up blacks from the lamp posts during the Civil War. The idiotic notion that we'd be One Nation, Under Marx, With Freedom and Equality for all but for the South is nothing but prejudice born of willful ignorance and self-imposed blindness. We'd be far better off the program of Reconstruction had been carried through, but it was the Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes (from Delaware, OH -- the central, not the southern, part of the state) who stole the Presidency in 1876 and sold Reconstruction down the river. We'd be better off if someone had followed Sherman's advice and executed the whole white Southern upper class, but we'd also be better off if someone had done the same to the Carnegies, Mellons, Fisks, Vanderbilts, and the Northern upper classes too.
--- tfast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
>
> I have to say the southern US fascinates the hell
> out of me. I went to a
> conference in North Carolina and if the women at the
> check in didn't ask
> "how did a fine Canadian boy like you get graced
> with the name Travis
> William". First time ever my first and middle name
> got hyphenated. My
> response "My father loves football and my Mother was
> a tad upwardly mobile."
> It has always interested me that my mother's
> reference for English gentry
> was the South.
>
> After four days in North Carolina the closest thing
> in my mental associative
> rolodex was South Africa. I could not help the
> association: there seemed to
> be a colour bar at work in the social division of
> labour. It was kind of
> comedic to me. Although no one else seemed to find
> it funny nor did they
> appreciate the obvious being pointed out.
>
> Outside of this superficial experience the South is
> just an x on my radar.
> Next summer I am going to take a road trip to the
> Southern US and see if I
> can begin to peel that mental onion.
>
> Travis William
>
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