[lbo-talk] The North's burden of enlightening the South (was Re: The "NAFTA Superhighway" Urban Myth)

[Eric]

>I don't want to get up on a Yankee high horse - we've got a lot to
>answer for too - but the South is different somehow, isn't it? Chris
>Kromm, who was on this list in its early days and is now director of
>the Institute for Southern Studies, was thinking for a while of doing
>a book for Verso on the South as an internal colony, with all the
>associated maldevelopment. There's something to that, no?
>
>Doug

Yes, exactly. But I took B.'s point to be that a lot of people, 
including people on this list, seem to assume that the South is the 
*source* of all that's rotten with the U.S. rather than a *symptom* 
of it. To my mind, though, it doesn't make much sense to offer up 
people, like Janis Joplin (though I would dispute that), who are 
exceptionally cool, or places, like Austin, that are exceptionally 
cool, as counterevidence, to prove that the South ain't all bad. It 
would seem to be more productive to figure out how and why the South 
has to hold such a place in the American political imaginary.

For what it's worth, I moved to the South when I was 18 and have 
lived almost half of my 38 years here, and I still can't make any 
fucking sense of the place. It's as incomprehensible today as the day 
I moved here.

Eric

(I don't hate the South, I don't, I don't, I don't.)