To the contrary, the abstract cited *begins* with a flat comparative statement, viz.: "The southern United States has long been known to be more violent than the northern United States."
>... In any case, your
>psychopathic hatred of and contempt for the South
>cannot be bolstered by the sort of evidence you cite
>.... You might not
>want a white Southerner to marry your sister, and
>apparently don't, but most people know enough to keep
>their lips zipped about embarrassing attitudes like
>that.
I admire your courage in confirming the stereotype -- offering an impressive example of a hypersensitive Southerner incandescent with rage about an affront to regional "honor." What malarkey.
Southerners so often want it both ways -- they go into a towering fury if
anyone disses the region as anti-intellectual yet over the course of many
generations the South has made little attempt to strengthen its poor public
school systems. The South -- whose right to the title Bible Belt no one,
including Southerners, disputes -- has been a prime purveyor of the
fundamentalism that has had such a toxic effect on US public policy. The
credulousness of True Believers represents the driving force, the Will to
Ignorance, that has made the US a world laughingstock so often of late.
>From rejection of evolution and embrace of "intelligent design" to
willingness to accept the claims of divinely-inspired George Bush about
Iraq's possession of WMDs despite no evidence at all -- Americans, with the
South in the lead, show an ever increasing tendency to dismiss the rigors of
reality and flee into a dreamland of simple faith.
It's not as if the South's retrograde qualities are all rooted in the legacy of its agrarian and slave-owning past. The Southern writer I admire is Walker Percy, whose novels have many acid observations about the contemporary South's fevered and free-wheeling free enterprise. Consider Atlanta, the very model of a modern, forward-looking Southern metropolis, whose crass money-grubbing as host to the 1996 Olympics awed the world and shamed the US.
I will be happy to praise the South lavishly as soon as the states of the former Confederacy show national leadership in public education, public health, public housing, occupational safety, workers' rights, business regulation, progressive taxation, etc. And I will offer my heartiest commendations to Dixie if it ceases its worshipful attitude toward the armed forces, closes its many military bases and shows national leadership in promoting antiwar policies.
But until then I will maintain a critical stance toward the South, a position that I expect will have little impact on day-to-day life in the region.
Carl
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