Because not *all* of it is some fucked up cartoon, and also for the same reason you think the "Stuff White People Like" blog is dumb (and I think it's dumb, too -- it's more like "What Grad Students Living on the Coastal Utopias Like").
I've mentioned some great things the South has given the nation/world -- rock & roll is one. The delta blues, another. People are free not to listen to rock & roll if they want, but that would be a pretty culturally sucky world.
On the other hand, you wrote a book called Wall St., a place that is in in the news lately. That isn't in Tupelo, Miss. There's a lot of backwardness in the South, as there is in the Midwest or in places like Wyoming and Montana and North Dakota, and the other places that formed the heartland of the 90s militia movement. I've shared my frustration with a lot of the prevailing politics and many of the nasty cultural attitudes in the US south, and am not a provincialist, but the exaggerated stereotypes, and *constant* shitting-on gets to be as insufferable as Chris Doss's Russian nationalism or Yoshie's Iran-o-philia.
Like I've said, I think it's a way people in NYC or the opposite coast try to evince their own cosmopolitanism, but crapping on other regions is really just another type of provincialism, "my scene versus yours," which as I remember you also found distasteful about the early punk scene.
-B.
Doug Henwood wrote:
"How wrong are we to do so?"
B. wrote:
"I know a lot of you love to dump on Texas and the south whenever you can."