SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

From the New Yorker courtesy of BuzzFlash:

Southern political passions have always been rooted in sometimes extreme ideas of morality, which has meant, in recent years, abortion and school prayer. But there is a largely forgotten Southern history, beyond the well-known heroics of the civil-rights movement, of struggle against poverty and injustice, led by writers, preachers, farmers, rabble-rousers, and even politicians, speaking a rich language of indignation. The region is not entirely defined by Jim DeMint, Sam Walton, and the Tide’s A J McCarron. It would be better for America as well as for the South if Southerners rediscovered their hidden past and took up the painful task of refashioning an identity that no longer inspires their countrymen.

More here.

The above linked essay uses most of its column space explaining how national attitudes have shifted away somewhat from what had been for a couple of decades the Southernization of national politics, leaving the South on a trajectory towards isolation, and cultural and political irrelevancy.  And that's all good and fine, I say.  Southern conservatism, with its deeply embedded sense of racism as a fueling force, has been an albatross around America's neck since I was a teenager.  Gun culture, glorification of violence and war, strong hostility toward labor, even from laborers themselves, judgmental fundamentalist Christianity, anger, anger, and resentment.  It's bad for the country, and if it's on its way out, it can't be bad.

On the other hand, I have deep affection for the South.  While I don't think of myself as a Southerner - I'm a Texan, and we Texans had our own nation, which we ended on our own terms, well before the Confederacy's failed and pro-slavery experiment was even conceptualized - I come from the extreme Western edge of East Texas, which is where the Southwest ends and the South begins.  I grew up as a Southern Baptist, which is about as organized and institutional as Southern culture gets, or, at least, as white Southern culture gets.  I believe in many Southern traditional values, loyalty, tradition, community, love of country, and the notion that there is something greater than our individual desires and concerns uniting us all together as human beings.  And I have lived in the Deep South for nearly a decade now.

That is, there is great value to this essentially American region, and the nation overall would do well to remember that.  But how do you separate Southern trash, of which there is a great deal, from Southern treasure?  How do you remove the backward-ass barbaric elements from the culture without destroying what is good about it?

I don't know.  

But I do like how the essay ends, which is excerpted above: the South, as a culture, cares about morality; the South cares about justice; the South cares about poverty.  If Southerners really can find a way to diminish that which is abhorrent about their beliefs and views, the region may very well rise again, but this time as a guiding light for the rest of the nation, leading us all toward that which is right and true, instead of sucking us down into a suicidal maelstrom like it's been doing for thirty years.  Yeah, I know, it's really weird to even contemplate such a thing.  But I live here.  I know the people here.  There is good here which is all but waiting to be unleashed.

It could happen.

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