--- Eric <rayrena at realtime.net> wrote:
"I still can't make any fucking sense of the place. It's as incomprehensible today as the day I moved here."
I've heard there are pockets of enlightenment in the South (which may mean simply pockets of northerners), and pleasant places to live (North Carolina), but overall I wouldn't expect to feel comfortable or safe anywhere there expressing a political opinion. (Of course, fifty miles from where I live in California, I have to be careful, too.)
BobW
> >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.)
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